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3/4/2003

Lars Kremer

Jack the Pelican, New York

'Bestiary'

To see a grown man try to look like a Boolaboo. Or say, a howling monkey. Really try. With little in the way of props. Only the muscles and bones of his face and body, and grim determination. - That is something.

In Lars Kremer's video installation, Shamanimal he does just that. But he does other animals too. Even little ones. It is for Kremer a move beyond self-consciousness, motive and intention. On the opposite end of the spectrum from Arnulf Rainer's drug-induced regressions into infantilism. But equally removed from the world of fashion wherein the rhetoric of pose translates into the possibility of evacuation and transcendence. Kremer truly inhabits his body. And in sloughing culturally-proscribed scriptings of flesh, he becomes keenly, primally alert. Like a lizard.

Kremer recasts the main space of the gallery as a hunter's trophy hall of life-size (i.e. enormous) digital photo-collages. One may recognize such images as George Stubb's Lion Attacking a Horse or Delacroix's Lion Attacking a Tiger. Others, sourced from more obscure 19th-century zoological compendiums, are precise graphical renderings of species classification. That they are all painstakingly composed of human anatomical fragments is immediately evident. They read clearly as the articulations of Kremer's own body (though sometimes others stand in), taut with the effort of expression. All, in the end, hold tightly to the contour line of his original 'animal art' model.

For Kremer, there is an insistence on identification. 'I am lion. I am sheep. I am pork.' Predators and prey, mostly. But he tempers his 'I am nature' shamanism with finger-on-the-trigger calculation. Inch for inch, pitching his performative intensity against the cold-blooded, strategic rigor of his dissections and re-splicings. They are seamless beasts, these things. Technology and human body, wrestled together.

Lars Kremer has long been interested in the human figure. One can trace the rudimentary beginnings of his current trajectory back to his 1994 video Anatomy Lessons, in which he is seen struggling to occupy the bodies of Renaissance figure studies. In each segment, the drawing appearing on the screen announces his intention-literally, to achieve the contour. It is an altogether improbable conceit that he approaches with deadpan conviction to create a startling drama.

Animals came into focus for Kremer via 15th-century Mughal painting, specifically the convention of depicting copulating lovers confined within the contours of sacred beasts. The force of these works for Kremer resides less in the cleverness of the doubling-as one might find, for example, in the works of Archimboldo-than in the redoubled tension of the micro/macrocosmic split.

After receiving his MFA in from Yale in 1991, Lars Kremer came to Williamsburg and founded the gallery Sauce, among the first of the area's artist-run spaces. In 1994, he debuted in New York with an exhibition of sculptures, videos and rubber drawings at the Caren Golden Gallery, her inaugural exhibition. This is his first Williamsburg solo exhibition.

Opens: April 4, 2003, 7-9pm

Gallery hours: Friday-Monday, 12-6

Jack the Pelican Presents
487 Driggs Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718-782-0183
Cross streets: North 9th & North 10th Streets
Subway: L Train to Bedford Avenue

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