By: Diane Vivona
Tom Eccles’ exhibition As Long as it Lasts at the Marian Goodman Gallery offers 14 artists’ reflections on mortality. The collected works propose witty, disturbing and complex perspectives on this time-honored topic that are sobering as well as fantastical. As a summer display (running from July 1through August 28), the theme is counter-intuitive to the season’s typically light fare, but perhaps this is why it works. The ever-looming presence of the hooded figure with the scythe is bearable, taken as a brief, shady relief from summertime’s blinding optimism.
Installation view “As Long As It Lasts,” 2009 at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. From left to right: Olivier Babin, Perfect Day (2007), vitrine, wood, synthetic diamond made from ashes of a cremated sculpture entitled 'D-Day' Courtesy Triple V, Lyon; Thomas Struth, Eleonor and Giles Robertson, Edinburgh (1988), c-print 26 1/2 x 33 3/4 in. (67.3 x 85.7 cm); Guido Van Der Werve, Nummer Acht (#8) everything is going to be alright (2007), 16 mm film transferred to DVD, 10 minutes Courtesy Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam; Gabriel Orozco, Obit: 'Fascist Journalist' (2008), archival Epson ink jet print with Ultra Chrome K3 Pigment Inks on Awagami, Kozo Natural 70 gm paper 83 x 43 3/4 in. (210.82 x 111.13 cm); Gabriel Orozco, Obit: 'Hawaiian Air Owner' (2008) archival Epson Ink Jet Print with Ultra Chrome K3 Pigment Inks on Awagami, Kozo Natural 70 gm paper 87 x 43 3/4 in. (220.98 x 111.13 cm).
Many of the artists present works that contemplate the inevitability of their own death and the possibility of escaping that fate through the loophole of art making. In Nummer act (#8) everything is going to be alright (2007), Guido Van Der Werve offers up a vision of life as literally a walk just a few steps ahead of death in a film where he calmly strolls about three or four feet ahead of a massive icebreaker on a frozen sea. Even if he plunges into the sea off camera, he will always remain alive and well in this work. Gabriel Orozco compiles New York Times obituary headlines, minus the deceased’s name, and prints them onto four large vertical sheets (87” x 43 ¾”) to create Obit: ‘Hawaiian Air Owner’ (2008). The collection of text, which includes lines such as “Ballerina who Dazzled Dance World,” “Studied Lives of Troubled Girls, “Biologist Whose Tests Fought Pests,” describes lives lived large enough to be noticed, reductively immortalized. By amassing a continuous stream of these short phrases, Orozco highlights the classically tragic irony of man’s desire for immortality itself.
Maurizio Cattelan, prince of the visual pun, offers Esaurito (Exhausted) (1993), a photograph documenting the moment when a writing instrument can no longer give out ink. This image aptly marks the death of the author via the leak of the pen. It is an apt metaphor for the finite nature of man’s vitality. Olivier Babin, in similarly cheeky vein, presents his death in a small vitrine—displayed is a synthetic diamond made from the cremated remains of one of his sculptures.
Installation view “As Long As It Lasts,” 2009 at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. From left to right: Gerhard Richter, 876-12 Glasscheibe (2002), Antelio Glass and supports; Pierre Huyghe, Opening (2009), archival pigment print on Epson luster paper; William Kentridge, Tide Table (2003), video projection: 16mm, 35mm and video with sound, transferred to Betacam and DVD; Thomas Struth, Eleonor and Giles Robertson, Edinburgh, (1988) c-print; Olivier Babin, Our Most Beautiful Years (Nos plus belles années) (2008), acrylic on canvas.
Within the group, several works focus on aging. Eleanor and Giles Robertson, Edinburgh (1988) by Thomas Struth is a photographic portrait of an elderly couple sitting together at a dining table. The two sit in divergent postures and gestures, looking in different directions. The bare wooden table and a dark stretch of red wallpaper separate them physically in the picture plane. Behind one is a closed door. Behind the other is an open doorway and sunlit window. Viewed within the framework of 17th century Dutch and Flemish allegory, the image could be seen as a narrative on the brevity of life. Two short, 8-minute films, Tacita Dean’s Mario Mertz (2002) and Artur Zmijewski’s Karolina (2002), also contemplate this theme. Dean’s film was an impromptu shoot of Merx, an elderly artist and a key figure in Arte Povera, during a visit to his home. Zmijewski’s film documents a girl of 18 who is bedridden with advanced osteoporosis, a disease most often associated with aging. Both works use journalistic cinematography where the camera rarely shifts, remaining centered on the subject. The central figures are also inactive, and this combined stillness of camera and figure protracts time. The tight focus on the subject creates a sense of confinement, producing a feeling for the viewer that the subjects want to be released (from life), but the film is holding them there, requiring them to stay.
Lars Laumann’s Berlinmuren (2008) and Pawel Althamer’s Skin (1997) stand out as possibly the two oddest works in the show. Althamer’s Skin is a leather suit with anatomically correct parts that stands in for the body’s natural covering. It is creepy, in a Hannibal Lecter kind of way. Laumann’s Berlinmuren is a 24-minute documentary portraying the experiences of two female animists who have fallen in love with the (now defunct) Berlin Wall. The women, one of whom formally “married” the wall, taking Berlinmuren as her last name, talk about their intimacy and emotional connection to this object and their devastation at its death. The belief that a soul or spirit lives in every object is one of man’s earliest beliefs, perhaps as far back as the Paleolithic age. Hearing these women discuss their recent animistic experiences (the film covers from the 1970s to 2008) brings back the idea presented throughout the show of gaining immortality through the creation of an object, artwork, monument, etc. It is a primitive hopefulness, to escape death and it seems, even for monoliths, an impossibility. Everything and everyone must face extinction.
“As Long as it Lasts” at Marian Goodman Gallery runs through August 28th
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