Interview

Tauba Auerbach's dizzying, opt-art minded work draws influence from many sources, from the stark graphic designs of Alexander Girard to Guy de Cointet's linguistic musings. Working across a variety of mediums, her current show of large-scale paintings, photographs and sculpture, Here and Now/And Nowhere at Deitch Projects, has a grand white elephant as its centerpiece. It's a two-person pump organ, which, dressed as cult priestesses, Auerbach and her friend Cameron Mesirow (aka Glasser) played to a rapt audience of a few hundred people during the show's opening. Auerbach and Mesirow designed the instrument, which like all proper white elephants is for sale (when the organ sells, a second one will be crafted for the artists' personal use).

Six "fold" paintings on the gallery's opposing wall are arranged to mimic the rising peak of the organ's pipes, a reminder of the overlap of the visual and auditory. If ever a gallery echoed a chapel, Auerbach's current show conjures a certain sanctity, a contemplative space for image and sound. (PHOTO: N DASH; DRESS DESIGNS BY IDA FALCK OEIEN)

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From the Making of The Ride, 2009. All images courtesy of Renwick Gallery

Meredith Danluck is an all-around American artist, who in her career has addressed the vicissitudes of fan culture from the niche fervor around geodesic architecture to the more mainstream madness of pop-star idolatry. In 2007 Danluck, backed by her dealer Leslie Fritz, paid $3,500 dollars for a thirty-second photo-op with Michael Jackson in Japan. The resulting 12-minute short, "Michael Jackson, Jesus Christ... Coca-Cola," opens with pandemonium. Handicapped children are loaded one by one (they did not have to pay) to meet the crestfallen star like the blind making a pilgrimage to Christ. The video goes on to capture the elaborate makeup process a Jackson impersonator endures in order to transform himself in the King of Pop. In full regalia the impersonator exploits the brand power of Jackson himself, and earns a living doing it (something the real King is less able to do of late).

Among her diverse, mixed media projects Danluck has also created a short music video for The Roots, in which one member of the ensemble taps, in rhythm, on everything the camera passes. Danluck is also considering developing further a video about the working conditions of coal miners in West Virginia, a film for which it was more difficult to find funding. Her latest project, a feature-length film about Professional Bull Riding  (PBR) is a social documentary with a dusty, sun-parched palette. It screens at MoMA this month, and coincides with a new series of photographs on display as part of her latest exhibition "Drinkability," which opens Friday at the Renwick Gallery. In one, a skeleton drives a vintage car; in another, a rattlesnake drops into the foreground, writhing against a sunset backdrop moments after its head was chopped off. Danluck has trained her eye to make the sometimes sensational exude preternatural ease.


SP: You have managed a career of making art about the American myth, its curiosities and conundrums, with conscientious aplomb, but would you say that your interests as an artist are local or global?

MD:  Well, the American myth itself transcends geographical boundaries and any microcosm has its analogous macrocosm. In a nutshell I'm deeply invested in American ideas, from celebrity to American idealism, but I don't think of them as being limited to American understanding.

SP: I guess the question could also be focused to ask: Do you consider a non-American audience when you make your work that is about myth and celebrity?

MD: I actually don't consider any particular audience.

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In his debut solo show of drawings "Dark Systems" at Deitch Projects this past winter, Evan Gruzis conjured the noirish world of Bret Easton Ellis novels, complete with Day Glo cotton candy colors, wayfarer-wearing apparitions, palm fronds, digital timepieces, and drawn open Venetian blinds. Gruzis was a painter before he started the MFA program at Hunter College, but his ink on paper works have drawn so much attention that he temporarily put his painting aside. In "Touch of Grey," his first show at Brooklyn's The Journal Gallery, which opened Friday, he exhibits both paintings and drawings and has created a small suite of images based on a recent visit to the palm-frocked shores of Florida. The works on paper focus on what's been washed up in the wake of recent disasters, both natural and manmade. Beach scenes include foreclosed homes and rotting fish heads, kitsch t-shirt quality graphic design and the flora and fauna of Margaritaville. The surface of one small painting of a lush, idyllic landscape "Crack is Wack, French Antilles (2009)," has deep, veined fissures that break up its surface as if too much humidity and sunlight cooked it.  A seductively backlit drawing of an angular skull and pineapple is a slick momento mori that would have made Gauguin envious for its juxtaposition of tropical beauty and menace. With the a skull paired opposite a pineapple, a universal symbol of welcome, the composition could be interpreted to read with lucklessly cheer "Welcome to Death." Gruzis' sharply focused drawings and fractured paintings in "Touch of Grey" ask what hurts worse: a financial disaster or an economic one?


"Touch of Grey" is on view through June 14. The Journal is located at 168 N. 1 St, Brooklyn.

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Self-portrait (golden sections), 2009

Matt Sheridan Smith's art takes the form of finite philosophical problems—meditations on an artist's labor, the limitations of self-portraiture, the meaning of representation—dressed in the most essential means. Blanks, Templates, Undos, Redos, Smith's debut solo exhibition, features four empty pedestals, a sparse, monochromatic series of works on paper, and a box of un-bent neon tubes spilled out on the floor—each of them a self-deprecating commentary on the incompleteness of art. Only a film of doors energetically opening and closing, culled from Robert Bresson's social critique L'Argent, projected on the wall, breaks up the composure of Smith's confounding, concise articulation of the nature of art making.

Self-portrait (golden sections) is an investigation of the Golden Ratio, a formula applied to sculpture, architecture, and early typography and based on the body's proportions. Smith used his own body's dimensions to determine the scale of four whiter-than-white pedestals, which then recall minimalist sculptures. It's a clever self-portrait of the artist as a pedestal and a platform for ideas. Elsewhere, Smith screenprinted Lorem ipsum, a dummy text used by typographers for centuries and based on Cicero's writings, onto paper. He covered it with a second layer of ink, which he then scratched off in part. Titled Neither is there anyone who loves pain itself for the literal translation of the Lorem Ipsum text, is exhibited here in several incarnations and color combinations; they're are literal attempts to reveal (or not) the cryptic words beneath the screenprinted surface. (LEFT: NEITHER IS THERE ANYONE WHO LOVES PAIN ITSELF (GRAY/BLACK), 2009)


Steve Pulimood: It was very easy to overlook at the current show, but on further thought I feel Self-portrait (golden sections) 2009 is one of the most ribald pieces of yours that I've seen. It's a representation of the body couched in the terms of an ancient ratio, but it's also a bunch of banal sculptural pedestals.

Matt Sheridan Smith: That work sits very quietly but it's really quite aggressive. The work is in a way the most voided out, empty piece in the show, yet it contains the most pressing content, the most concentrated "presence" of the artist. I had been interested in using display, and the rhetorical dimensions of display, as a way of generating sculptural form. I was considering pedestals as simply forms themselves, and an array of pedestals as a sort of readymade minimalist sculpture. But the way the piece ended up articulating itself, as a set of pedestals with dimensions generated from measurements of my own body that mirror techniques and formulas used in Classical sculpture, came out of a trip to the Vatican I took last year.

SP: Several Classical themes—the Lorem Ipsum, the use of golden ratios—are woven through the exhibition. Why?

MSS: The whole Classical thread in the exhibition kind of came out of an encounter with a large Greek bronze. There aren't many of them left for numerous reasons; I was told only between ten and twenty still exist. Many were melted down by the Romans for the metals to make weaponry. The one I was looking at, I was told, only survived because it had been hit by lightning. So it was, in effect, "cursed" by the Gods, and thus unfit for Roman soldiers about to head into battle. They buried it upside down. It was on a giant plinth, which became like a headstone.

SP: This Greek bronze must have made a powerful impression on you.

MSS: It sat there for who knows how long. I had a really kind of corny, auratic experience in front of that sculpture. Even so, building the anecdotal origin of the piece directly into the work would dictate too much meaning from my end and not leave enough room for others. I think my work, with all the standards and heuristics and rules, could be misinterpreted as process driven, or even mechanical, but really I'm just trying to leave a lot of room. I try to leave myself out if it wherever I can. Of course I'm actually built into the dimensions of the piece, but I'm also kind of the part that's buried upside down.

SP: Did you always plan on being an artist?

MSS: I came to making art in a rather roundabout way. Or, rather, came back to making art. I had planned to go to art school but in the final decision phase ended up focusing entirely on programs where there was a dual degree option. I have always had a strong interest in writing and in philosophy, media studies, "theory" in shorthand, and I suppose I wanted to do that work among people who were doing it firstly, and not as an elective. Long story short, I dropped out of the studio program before it really even started. It wasn't until a couple years after I finished my degree (in philosophy and media studies in the end) that I came back to the idea of producing art in the way I am now.

SP: This is not intended to be a flippant question, but why make art?

MSS: I would say for me it was... a disappointment in writing, although writing is still very important to me. I think at a certain point I saw a type of production in contemporary art where things could be stand-ins for ideas and that allowed them to generate more ideas in a way that was simply more fluid and open ended than the type of writing I was interested in.

SP: Did the art begin as an avenue to vent certain problems that you felt needed to be addressed?

MSS: It could be that what attracts me to art objects is their potential for conciseness. The artworks I respond most too tend to be extremely concise. Not only does this avoid the tedium of explaining everything, or the pressure to ground it absolutely (be that a theoretical or referential grounding, both types I tend to try to use sparingly)—but art also does something very productive with the negative space around it, the unexplained space. What I mean is the way that space gets filled out by viewers, critics, curators, other artists. Even though a lot of my work stems from pretty articulated and intentional ideas, the works that make it out are always the ones where there's no possibility of my perspective on the work becoming the dominant or only reading.

Blanks, Templates, Undos, Redos is on view at Lisa Cooley Fine Art until May 24. Lisa Cooley is located at 34 Orchard Street, New York. Smith will contribute to a group show, "Unaddressed Circumventions: Folds from a Failed Suicide," which opens this week at Gresham's Ghost, 521 West 26 St, New York.

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