Dreams of the East

The following is an art review I wrote for Art New England. The show I reviewed was called Dreams of the East. The artist's name is David Shapiro (view his website here), who operates out of Brooklyn, New York City. The New Haven, CT venue in which the show appeared is an upscale backyard garage operation called Grand Projects (view their website here).

*****
Dreams of the East is a unique eight-painting installation incorporating Orientalist themes culled from the contemporary mass media. The images were rendered in fluorescent paint on canvas, and brought to life under black light. (To this reviewer’s knowledge, the technique has never been used.) The black light is flipped on and off at five-minute intervals, illustrating how the West selectively tunes in and tunes out the Pantheons of fame and the Underworlds of otherness.

When the black lights are off, the paintings are dull red or violet silhouettes. When the black light flips on, the paintings take on an eerie glow similar to television screens. They are freeze frames of famous white women in Arab harems; masked revolutionaries running towards the screen; celebrities like Whitney Houston, Angelina Jolie, and Brad Pitt visiting downtrodden peoples; and early Danish Internet pornography. Some of the images were faked on many levels, such as Anna Kournikova: Hot! Fake! Pic!, which is a photo of the tennis star’s face superimposed on the body of an anonymous porn star posing in a harem. Therefore, the image is triply or even quaternarily removed from reality.

The contemporary images in Dreams were culled from the Internet and television, yet the subjects recapitulate the works of such masters as Duccio, Gros, and Delacroix. Nobody Leading the People, for example, is a twist on Delecroix’s Liberty Leading the People. While Liberty depicts a violent revolutionary charge led by an ideal manifested as a common woman, Nobody depicts Haitian rebels charging towards the camera, storming the viewer.

Dreams of the East is a veritable catacombs of ideas, themes, subtexts, tropes, and theories. There are multitudes of access points into the catacombs, and every turn yields another series of choices. The intensity and thoroughness of both technique and concept make this installation a true original.

Mamzer Loshen

The following is an art review I wrote for the print edition of Art New England. The show I reviewed was called Mamzer Loshen/Bastard Tongue, named for the traditionalist Yiddish pejorative term for the English language. The artist's name is Johanna Bresnick (view her website here), who operates out of New Haven, Connecticut. The venue in which the show appeared is an upscale backyard garage operation called Grand Projects (view their website here).

*****

Mamzer Loshen/Bastard Tongue is a freewheeling exploration of the tumultuous Jewish identities of Johanna Bresnick and Mike Cloud. Its inspiration was found in a recent standoff between an illegal Israeli settlement and the Israeli Army. As both parties had eschewed using guns against kinsmen, the settlers resorted to some rather comical battle tactics, as commemorated in The Upsetters (Set it off). Here, surrounded by an oil slick and draped in razorwire, a drywall barricade is found stocked with an arsenal of harmless but potentially annoying projectiles: paint-filled light bulbs, plastic bottles full of colored water, spray foam, and small rocks.

The installation turns satirical in Tigers of Long Island (Plagues). When viewed from above, the top edges of this elegant paper structure spell out the Ten Plagues in script. Frogs, hail, death of the firstborn, and the other plagues are all duly cited, along with some new ones: gas, migraine, gingivitis, ulcer, and so on.

Elevating satire to outright rebuke, From Mouth to Mouth brazenly flouts a Tanakh, the sacred book of Judaism, rent to pieces and stuffed into gel caps for easy consumption.

The structurally inventive Divine Image (Cosmic Tree Remix) seamlessly integrates the Burning Bush with the Kabbalah Tree of Life as a crimson wax candle with many wicks. The fallen leaves beneath the bush resemble tongues – the Bastard Tongues of semi-estranged Jews.

The most deeply layered – and funniest – component of Mamzer Loshen is a bedsheet emblazoned with a small image of Russian figure skating champion Oksana Baiul, and punctured to create a hole with the width of a phallus. This constellation of symbols cleverly re-contextualizes various sexual fetishes and myths.

Mamzer Loshen is jarring. It alternately antagonizes and cracks wise, restates questions and dismisses answers – and ultimately transmits the essential tumult of a modern Jewish-American heart.

Northern Lights

My mother woke me up before dawn.

“Come quick,” she intoned as I rubbed my bewildered eyes. There was excitement and urgency in her voice. “This is very important.”

We stood on the balcony of our third-story apartment and looked out beyond the playgrounds of my elementary school, over the trees huddled on the horizon, and witnessed the Northern Lights.

Aurora borealis! There in the sky it flashed! Green and blue and purple and others, a whole mess of colors flashing madly, off there in the distance, just above the trees and reflected in the lumpy blanket of clouds that kept us all warm that night. It looked like what concert bells sound like.

Grace

I believe in the simple magic of saying the words Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.

I was homeless for a while. I spent the first week of my homelessness with my girlfriend, who had flown in from New Mexico to Connecticut to see me. I took a bus up from New Haven and met her in Hartford. We stayed in an international youth hostel called America House, which was run by an old Taiwanese couple, Grace and David.

Grace enthusiastically regaled us with her descriptions of a Buddhist group she belongs to called Soka Gakai, the mission of which is to get people together and chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. “When you chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,” Grace would intone, smiling at us through that cute accent of hers, “you get good things coming to you.” My girlfriend and I smiled back at the anthropological curiosity of a real live Buddhist.

At the end of the week, as I was kissing my girlfriend goodbye, I realized my wallet was missing. I patted myself down and ransacked my suitcase. The bus came, my girlfriend went. I was utterly alone and penniless and homeless and adrift in a town I knew nothing about. I returned to the hostel to scan the room in which we had stayed. No wallet. No ID card, no Social Security card, no nothing. No money to get back to New Haven. I screwed up my courage to leave, and said goodbye to Grace for the second time.

“You wait,” Grace said, disappearing into the hostel. She emerged with three dollars and a baggy full of change. Suddenly a cloud lifted from the woman’s face, which took on an otherworldly gravity and locked eyes with me. This serious side of Grace was new to me. I froze. She spoke.

“I am old woman. I have seen a lot. You are young. You are strong and you are smart. You get yourself good job. You have to be good man for your girlfriend. You get yourself good job and live good life. Chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo every day. When you chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, you get good things coming to you. You are going to be okay.”

Her sternness melted to a sad smile. I looked at her and bit back tears, cupping the money she had given me between my hands, involuntarily holding them chest high and bowing my head as if in prayer. “Thank you. Thank you.” I walked away chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, not because I believed, but because I was too afraid to think.

I found the wallet ten minutes later. It was sitting undisturbed in a restaurant booth where my girlfriend and I had sat the night before. I made a mental note to phone Grace with the good news. She would be sweet and kind and terse and prescriptive and brief and busy and beautiful like an old woman who has seen a lot in her long life.

Hi.

I feel sheepish. People cared enough to inquire about my absence. Thanks so much, my friends. I wish I could know you in the personal, but this sphere is so large, and space is so long. And money, always the money. Wouldn't it be great if we could just beam ourselves about a la Star Trek? Such a childish wish.

I am done with 9/11. I've had enough. I'm convinced. I'm tired of trying to convince others. That's not a complaint or accusation. It's just there's only so much a psyche can take. Mine has seen its limit, as far as 9/11 goes. Currently my research is culminating in a hip hop song about it. I've made lots and lots of hip hop, but I'm taking special care with this one. I'll be sure to post it here when I'm done.

I'm not abandoning this blog. I'll keep it around. I'm glad there are a bunch of people out there who are trying to change this world. I believe you are succeeding. I don't know how, nor do I know what the future holds, but I have faith in your ability to function in this world and fulfill whatever you see as your destiny.

But I will not be around all the time, as I was. My artistic pursuits are taking front burner to this blog now. Perhaps I will morph it into an artistry-related blog. That could do very nicely. Expect format changes in that case.

All I can say about 9/11 is this: if you feel a desire to research it and drive yourself a little nuts, temporarily, then please do it. I still believe that 9/11 truth is the ONLY thing that could ever bring about any real change. It's psychological in nature. It is a symbol. It contains more motivational power than all the other issues combined and multiplied by ten. It's our only prayer for escaping mass hypnosis.

I love ya.

Musclemouth