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2009 ARTFORUM.COM CRITICS PICKS Teresita Fernández This exhibition presents an exquisite selection of Teresita Fernández’s recent sculptural works that reveals her perceptual experience of the natural world through a set of reductive materials. Featuring forms constructed of raw and milled graphite, precision-cut aluminum panels, glass, and onyx, Fernández deftly blends biomorphic patterning, fractal-like repetition, and complex systems of reflection to invoke phenomenological experience as framed by the act of looking. Vertigo (sotto en su), 2007, a cantilevered, highly polished metal array comprising eleven stacked layers that resemble the overlapping and delicate boughs of a silvery tree, extends above visitors. The horizontal flow of the work offers the reflections of viewers in its leafy cutout patterns while creating a beautifully understated interplay between image and object, as well as a subtle cinematic experience through continually shifting imagery. Epic, 2009, consists of an expansive graphite wall drawing and a sculptural installation that depict a mountain landscape mottled with trees or a band of wispy clouds. The scale of the work, particularly its width, engenders a virtual experience of being in a mountainous landscape or on the high plains. Projection Screen (Black Onyx), 2007, also acutely locates viewers in both a cinematic and a straightforward relationship to the gallery space. Consisting of a symmetrical pattern of black onyx beads installed in a horizontal rectangular form, the piece reflects viewers engaging with the work and embodies a central aspect of the exhibition––an experience that feels at once transcendent and familiar.
Julie Weitz GP: Your new works straddle the line between figuration and abstraction while also remaining in close dialogue with contemporary political issues—and all of this without slipping into a reductive evaluation of such loaded imagery. These oppositions seem to be weighed equally throughout the works, which leads me to my first question. While you are working squarely within the idiom of portraiture, you are also obscuring—or negating—the specific identity of the subjects wearing the hoods. Along these lines, how does the idea of literal representation operate within your work? JW: From the beginning, the choice to deal with media-based images in my work, images that were synonymous with the “War on Terror,” caught me in a predicament. How could I evoke a new way of seeing an image that was already so loaded, obvious and overstated? And yet the impulse to work with an image like the headscarf or terrorist mask was to confront the issue head-on, to complicate a way of seeing something that had been reduced to an ideological slogan. In the process of making the work, I discovered that the mask could become a symbol for this problem of representation, the overwhelming desire to see something that is deliberately hidden or masked from view. So I attempted to represent, as literally as possible, an individual that I could not see—and within the context of traditional portraiture this sets up a contradiction of sorts. Symbolically, this seemingly impossible act resonated with me; it was a time when rhetorical, and actual attacks against an unknown enemy inundated our media landscape. On the one hand, my work could be viewed as a form of portraiture, but on the other hand, it could also be seen as a system of classification, one that mimics stylistically the meticulous detail of a naturalist painter and yet mocks conceptually the desire to contain and subjugate one’s topic of representation. I tend to think about this approach to portraiture in relation to the work of 18th and 19th century catalogers, like John James Audubon. His project to visually document bird species of North America produced meticulous paintings, which he considered scientific in nature. GP: Also along the lines of the literal—particularly in the case of the single hood paintings—you are presenting what feels like depictions of individuals within the political situation in the Middle East. How directly—or literally—do you feel like you relate to that situation? JW: Without going into too much autobiographical detail, I’ll describe to you a photograph I recently rediscovered of me at sixteen in Israel. I’m dressed in military uniform, laying stomach down alongside two friends as an Israeli soldier instructs us in the use of M-16 rifles. It was part of a summer camp program in Israel—a week spent with the Israeli Defense Forces—and a rite of passage for many Jewish American teens. Learning to shoot a semi-automatic weapon seemed like a logical part of my experience growing up and I remember enjoying it—that is, until I actually fired the gun. Looking at this photo today, I can’t help but ask: Who did I think was my target? The truth is that I had no idea, I wasn’t thinking about it. In a sense, you could characterize these portraits as my quest to visualize the assumption of an enemy. GP: How did you come to use such a fragile media such as gouache? The match with the delicate rendering of the imagery seems keenly apropos. Also, can you talk about your choices with respect to the overall materiality and scale of the paintings? JW: I originally responded to gouache as a material because of its intense color and opacity. For this reason and because of its quick drying time, illustrators and comic book artists often use gouache and I appreciate this stylistic link to my work. On a large scale, working with gouache requires focus and discipline; I’ve developed a process that guides the build up of repeating layers of pattern to create dimension. Although the work takes a long time and the technique can become monotonous, I like the slowness of the process; it creates intimacy between the image and myself as it slowly develops in front of me. Mostly, I work with a very small brush so there’s always a moment in the process where I’m surprised, when the masked image begins to come together through the sum of small marks. GP: There is a strong notion of hybridity in the newer works—especially regarding the cloth selection of the head coverings. Where do you cull the images of the head coverings from, and secondly, how do you compose these juxtapositions? JW: I collect images of masked faces from the Internet or newspapers and magazines—these can be of terrorists, prisoners, soldiers, riot police, anarchists, religious and political leaders. I use these images as a source for designing coverings that I make in the studio using pre-bought ski masks, scarves, hats and yards of fabric. I then use the head coverings in staged photographs with actual models. Did you know Audubon actually laid out dead birds on the surface of his paper to get the scale right? Unlike Audubon, I like my subjects alive, but like Audubon, I use a real subject to dictate composition, light source and pose. GP: What kind of specificity is located in the selection of fabrics? And further, how significant are those choices? JW: The specificity of the fabrics was important initially, and the viewer may have obvious associations with these different types of fabric, but particularly with the new works, which bring together a composite of recognizable patterns, I think of the fabrics mostly in terms of their visual differences. I contrast color and pattern to break the space apart and use composition and value to compress the space together. Each fabric is its own entity and yet is forced to live with others. GP: Yet along these lines, the newer works seem like depictions of an identity—confused terrorist—and in this sense, become generic signifiers for terrorism or civil transgression in general. Would you say that this is the case, or where specifically do you locate the conceptual center of these works? JW: I call these works The Guardians and titled the catalog “Who Will Guard the Guards.” It’s a question Plato asked in the Republic, one about moral authority and the accountability of the State. At the beginning of making this series, I was listening to Jane Mayer’s Dark Side in the studio (I often listen to audio books while I’m working). The book is about how the Bush administration legalized torture and derided American ideals in the process. I began to think about The Guardians as watchmen stuck in some compressed space, forced to see and watch each other as a whole unit, a composite form. The etymology of the word “person” derives from the Latin “persona” which referred to both a mask and a Roman citizen. So the concept of individual personhood is sort of wrapped up in the idea of roles, which we knowingly don. I don’t mean to be quip, but terrorist is such an overused word today, adopted by governments to marginalize their political enemies. In some way, with these works, I think I’m trying to unravel those assumptions and level out the playing field. GP: Particularly with regard to Guardian 5, there is a component of blindness—or barely being able to apprehend the world from the interior¾to how you render the subject. How much is the subject’s ability to see out of the mask important to you? JW: That’s an interesting question because I think that I have stopped thinking about these subjects as actual people. I’ve begun to see them more as projections, sites of fear, sorrow, abuse and confusion. Blindness, in this case, points to a lack of transparency, a purposeful covering up of information. But these works also question the viewer’s ability to see rather than the subject’s. The repetitive patterns and unsettling contrast of color conflate the space and slow the viewing experience down. The viewer has to discern what they’re looking at, and that requires focus. Generally, I don’t think we’re used to examining certain images closely or carefully, particularly when we see them over and over. My intention is that the viewer might become more aware of the act of looking in the process of doing it. [ Images ]
ARTFORUM.COM CRITICS PICKS Werner Reiterer On entering Werner Reiterer’s exhibition “Raw Loop,” viewers quickly discover themselves amid an interactive sculptural field seemingly driven by a dark presence. Evoking the early video works of Vito Acconci, Come Closer to Leave, 2008, comprises a stack of public-address speakers that, once approached, broadcasts the voice of the artist speaking a seductive monologue: “Hi . . . come closer . . . don’t be scared . . . ” But as viewers do come closer, the sound track abruptly shifts to a profane rant that includes “Go away, leave me alone, suck my . . . ” among other insults, with their expletives bleeped for the US version of the piece. Also triggered by motion sensors, Raw Loop, 2008, presents a disturbingly realistic life-size human figure sitting slouched against the wall with a cloth bag over its head. As viewers near the work, the sculpture begins to emit a wheezing sound track, and the bag inflates and deflates with every breath. Life Counts Death, 2008, is a large, minimalist cube with a bass-drum pedal attached that, when stepped on, chimes the sound of a church bell. Adjacent to this work, a drawing of the sculpture, titled The Life-Song, 2007, includes text that explains: EVERY “GONG” MARKS THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF TWO MEN. Other drawings on view from Reiterer’s series “The Drawn Exhibitions,” 1997–2008, evoke the artist’s poignantly loopy universe and serve as a form of narration. In Waiting for Nihilism, 2004, a wooden stage is depicted on which footprints lead in a circle, each labeled TACK, TOCK, TACK, TOCK––aptly reflecting the comically bleak tenor of the exhibition.
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