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5/2/2014

John Waters / Michail Pirgelis / Karen Kilimnik

Spruth Magers, Berlin

John Waters

Bad Director’s Chair

One of the most celebrated directors in American independent cinema, John Waters is at his vibrant best when flaunting Hollywood’s rules or reveling in bad taste. The director of Pink Flamingos (1972) and Pecker (1998) brings the same wit and audacity to the art gallery. Perched upon his Bad Director’s Chair, Waters has cast his eye over some unlikely corners of the film business, transforming his observations of all the glamour and heartbreak of Hollywood into photographic essays and narrative sculptures that are both ridiculously honest and brutally humorous. Waters becomes the self-appointed press agent for his newly conceived “little movies” who would surely be fired the first day of a shoot by the furious producers.

Waters began making his photo-based work in 1992 by watching movies, using his insider knowledge to stay alert to those telltale moments and details that everyone else overlooks, not least the movie’s director. He snaps a single frame from a film, often from a TV, and recombines these images into a storyboard-like sequence, thus re-directing some of his favorite films through playful acts of appropriation. Cut off from their source, the stills take on a range of new meanings, and the strip sets off a loose, irresolvable set of associations or narratives. Product Placement (2009) features iconic film stills re-photographed and altered to show famous movie stars promoting banal consumer items as if they were magic talismans essential to the story. There’s no room for reverence here: Waters makes Aschenbach, the lovesick composer from Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), grasp a jar of pasta sauce instead of reaching out for imperishable beauty. Rear Projection (2009) treats a series of actors’ bottoms as if they were cinema screens, or places anonymous backsides in preposterous cameos, looming absurdly in the background. Even the finale of a film is altered forever: after given a new life by Waters, the words “The End” will never mean quite the same thing again.

The same mischievous spirit goes into one-liners such as Epic (2003), where Waters takes the title treatment of 70s disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure and turns it upside down, like the doomed cruise ship that is the movie’s namesake. With an insider’s wink, Waters collapses one of Hollywood’s most beloved “disaster movies” into a single image. Neurotic (2009) shows four flash cards in a single frame. Are the little title treatments from a documentary about psychiatry? Or are they being shown to a live TV audience, instructing them how to feel about a scene? “Sorrow”, “Anxiety”, “Suffering” and “Disappointment” appear simultaneously as if a sudden reflection of the viewer’s state of mind. But who is being mistreated here, the feelings of the audience or all of show business itself?

Waters brings a darker mood to his sculptures. In Playdate (2006) Michael Jackson, all dressed up in cuddly pink pajamas, lifts his hand up to a diminutive but fully bearded Charles Manson. “Two famous media villains,” says Waters about his work, “Charles Manson and Michael Jackson, reborn as perfect babies – could they have saved each other if they had met on a playdate before their lives went wrong?” In Bad Director’s Chair (2006), a typical canvas chair demanded by Hollywood auteurs is labeled with words that seem to reflect the deepest doubts of any filmmaker. “Unprepared”, “Hack”, “No Shot List”, among other disasters, all appear printed on the wood or canvas, as if the chair itself was the embodiment of an on-set nightmare.

Also part of the exhibition, three of the artist’s earliest films, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964), Roman Candles (1966) and Eat Your Makeup (1968), will play in loops in specially designed ‘peep’ rooms.

Beyond the gallery, Image Movement will show John Waters' Top Ten Art Films You Should Watch Now, while DFFB will host a solo exhibition of his photographic work, focusing on the series Marks. John Waters will bring his lecture This Filthy World to Germany, appearing at the Schauspiel, Cologne on 7 February, Volksbühne, Berlin on 9 February, and the Kampnagel, Hamburg on 10 February.

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Michail Pirgelis

ADOPTED

In 1935 Walter Benjamin coined the term aura, a description of an aesthetic experience that was difficult to convey in words, which he had encountered when observing specific objects: a kind of atmospheric condensing, which seemingly revealed the essence of the objects, a simultaneous feeling of great proximity and distance. The works in adopted, the new exhibition by Michail Pirgelis at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, tend to conjure up Benjamin’s notion of the aura. The objects on display also refer to so much more than just themselves, appearing equally near and incredibly remote. They evoke a number of psychological and physical associations which the viewer can hardly avoid. Despite their almost minimalist austerity, they enable archaeological insights into a world which has never been seen in this way before.

Michail Pirgelis finds the material for the majority of his works from airplane cemeteries in California and Arizona, where discarded passenger planes await their dismantling and the recycling of their valuable aluminium and titanium alloys. Pirgelis removes individual segments from the gigantic aeronautical bodies, for further modification in his studio. For adopted he has left some of them in their original state, such as the brake mechanism of the work Onera, almost three meters in size and reminiscent of a cross. On other airplane components such as the canvas-sized, rectangular fragments of an airplane’s exterior skin, he has partially exposed the metal beneath the coat of lacquer. Likewise he has sanded and polished the calotte in When it is called a moment – a component from the fuselage of an airplane, responsible for cabin pressurisation, normally invisible to passengers – until its curved aluminium surface resembles a convex mirror. Together with two other calottes it looms within the exhibition space in a concentric configuration of three. Finally, for the work Beer or Wine, Pirgelis has mounted flexible airplane cabin flooring, which still retain all the traces of adhesive, screws, and the holes for seat legs, on an invisible base with a suspension mechanism.

Whilst the works on display – as a result of their reworking and decontextualising – may have shed their original functions, they have now become sculptural objects with a distinctive presence. They are occasionally reminiscent of Gordon Matta-Clark’s heroic gestures in deconstructing houses and factory buildings, sometimes of John Chamberlain’s car body sculptures and Donald Judd’s minimalist fetish for aluminium, of Rosemarie Trockel’s psycho-socially charged objects, or the archaeological finesse of Cyprien Gaillard’s installations.

The works in adopted are both cultural relicts and objects that may be considered within the history of art. Pirgelis has succeeded in extending Conceptual Art’s long history by means of a highly specific sensibility and the radical position he has adopted.

A notable aspect of this position is its narrative strength. This contributes enormously to the objects’ auratic charge. The works on show succeed in revealing the suppressed fears which are often unconsciously associated with flying, even though for many of us this has become part of our everyday experience. Pirgelis’ reworking of found paraphernalia in earlier exhibitions already drew attention to the cultural compensation mechanisms of fashion, glamour, and high style, which for a long time were required to distract people from their fear of flying. In adopted, a silkscreen print of a Pan Am publicity photo showing the well-known Spanish-French clown and former international star Charlie Rivel, provides a good illustration of such a scenario. In the photo, staged as high comedy, Rivel seems to be thanking heaven that he has safely arrived on the ground already while descending the stairs of the plane. In addition, Pirgelis repeatedly returns, in his sculptural works, to the dream of flying, one that perhaps will soon be a thing of the past. The “recycled” materials in his works tangibly address the anxieties linked to air travel in an era of diminishing resources, oil crises, terror attacks, global recession, and climate change.

In terms of cultural history flying has always been understood as the epitome of human hubris – an activity which was accompanied by the possible threat of divine retribution. The works in adopted are distinctive in their mixing of the archaic with high technology, of vulnerability with strength, transforming the notion of hubris into an almost physical experience. That objects of such a scale, such weight, and such fragility are able to overcome gravity, to convey humans safely through the earth’s atmosphere, inevitably challenges the limits of the viewer’s imagination. Perhaps Benjamin was thinking of precisely this feeling of precariousness, or even the magical, when he coined his term aura.

Michail Pirgelis (*1976, Essen) lives and works in Cologne. In 2010 he received the Audi Art Award for “New Positions” at Art Cologne and was an artist in residence at Schloss Ringenberg. In 2008 he was the first recipient to be awarded the Adolf Loos Prize from the Van den Valentyn Foundation, Cologne. In 2007 he was awarded the Villa Romana Prize in Florence. In 2011 Pirgelis’s work was shown in a solo exhibition at Artothek in Cologne. He has participated in group exhibitions at Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf (2005), Kunstmuseum Bonn (2010), Thessaloniki Biennale (2011), Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2012), and Istanbul Modern (2013), amongst others.

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Karen Kilimnik

Over the past two decades, Karen Kilimnik has become known for her playful treatment of celebrities and nostalgia, combining a love for stories, costumes and magic to create highly theatrical yet intimate exhibitions. Using a wide range of media, including installation, drawing and photography, and not least her distinctive paintings, she orchestrates a range of references, from scraps of lowbrow fame to the trappings of European aristocracy. In her exhibition in Berlin, adapted and expanded from her show organized by Le Consortium, Dijon, for the vineyard L’Académie Conti in Burgundy, Kilimnik will exhibit a body of work that juxtaposes images of wealth and war, fairytales and femininity.

The core of the exhibition is a group of new still life photographs, many set in a leafy, bucolic landscape. The mood of the show is established in A summers day picnic, where a small picnic of tea and biscuits is laid out on a small patchwork towel, as ornamental as it is nourishing. Here we find some of the key motifs in this body of work: an artificial bird, a large silver vase filled with flowers, cheap, everyday food and cosmetic jewelry all occupy the same ritualistic space. The picnic itself is at once casual and elaborate, its ersatz pageantry suggesting that a group of children were acting out a fairytale of their own devising. The mix of childishness and magic continues into The golden coins in the forest, where two blue tits appear to be protecting a Chanel charm bracelet. In Fox with winter cache of food in the winter cave fox den, a jewel-bedecked fox astride a gold ring looks over his snowy smorgasbord of schnitzel, cake and a cherry-topped sundae. Kilimnik deploys little throwaway toys to create tableaux that invoke stories, yet the viewer is in the position of trying to come up with tales that might match the pictures. The mood alters in Runway in field french countryside 1943, french resistance, (all 2013), where a WWII - era Lancaster bomber completes a circle formed by six little candles. This mysterious ritual, at once childish and sinister, triggers a new range of ideas about the nature of the toys and their origin, or perhaps a darker history of the land upon which the rituals are enacted.

The toy planes that Kilimnik uses in the photographs will also be exhibited. The model Spitfires and Lancaster bombers, encrusted in jewels and placed on plinths, become decorative objects, useless even as toys or models. The rituals and tableaux depicted in the photographs might be taking place in the grounds of an aristocratic chateau or in the forests of Burgundy, alongside some of the most famous and prestigious vineyards in the world. Kilimnik collects objects and images of fantasy, privilege and power, and transforms them with deft acts of decoration, a gesture that is both playful and iconoclastic. Images of wealth, artificiality and magic all occupy the same theatrical space, emphasizing how structures of authority can be undermined – or bolstered – by the wide-eyed innocence of a fairytale.

Karen Kilimnik (born 1955, Philadelphia, USA) studied at the Temple University in her hometown where she lives and works today. Major solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2012), the Belvedere, Vienna (2010), the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2006), the Serpentine Gallery, London, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami and Le Consortium, Dijon (all 2007), the Fondazione Belvilacqua La Masa, Venice (2005) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2002). Major group exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008), the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the MoMA PS1, New York (both 2006), the MoMA, New York (2005, 2001, 1999), the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1997, 1992), and the Secession, Vienna (1994). In 2011 Kilimnik created a stage setting for the ballet Psyche at the Opéra National de Paris.

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For more information and press inquiries, please contact Sina Deister (sd@spruethmagers.com).

Exhibition Opening: 06.02.2014, 6 pm ‒ 9 pm
Opening Times of the Gallery: Tue – Sat, 11 am – 6 pm

Spruth Marges Berlin-London
Oranienburger Straße, Berlin
Hours: Tues. – Sat., 11 am – 6pm
Admission: Free

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