I first heard of Banks Violette when a colleague told me that another artist had made a melting unicorn head. I was bummed - since I was really fond of mine- and was wanting my idea to be unique. Now I see that his work and my work are actually nothing alike. The unicorn is almost an anomaly within his work - it fits but doesn't at the same time. His aesthetic is very dry, clean, masculine, shiny...and almost harsh. The unicorn's whiteness certainly goes with his other monochromatic work...and the idea of deterioration works next to partially torn down guard rails, crushed pieces of metal and scattered white tube lights.
In reading about Violette's work- his focus is on youth and subcultures. According to Interview Magazine, he celebrates 'their revolt and reveal[s] the queasy way they recycle images and slogans to keep themselves alive.'
Much of Violette's work is very pared down: to glossy black, white glowing light, white glossy objects, metal- it works around direct iconography or boils it down to image's base and individual elements (takes it apart and uses elements sparingly). The iconographic images (deer, Christ, skull, cross, unicorn) work in a separate space - where the images they represent carry their own history and weight- as iconic images do.
On the Brask Art blog - where I found the image of his studio with the upside down cross - the author describes Bank's work as:
'The cold, mimimalist visual language Banks Violette (b. 1973, New York) uses, refers to the dark side of American culture: the gothic scene, satanic rituals, death metal,....Violette's installaations evoke violence, aggression and excess, without lapsing into anecdotalism.'
With Bank's work - I'm turned off and very curious about how the cold, minimalist aesthetic carries violence across (vs. imagery that is not minimalist and not necessarily cold). I'm thinking of Barney's work which is also cold but not minimilast. Barney embraces the direct use of iconography. What does Bank's boiling down of iconography do in contrast (in those instances where it is boiled down.)? There is a way in which something cold shuts me out. It becomes institutional and, therefore, unavailable to me as a human being. (Institutional feels bigger than the indiv. human - out of our control in some way). Minimalism has its own distance. These distances from the individual viewer are different from each other - but both are removed.
If I think of Barney's work and my distance from it --- it is in it's coldness. And it's money that makes it bigger than myself. But he brings the human being back around to identifying with what is going on with iconography, historical imagery and fashion and the horror and abjection of the body. He scares us and revolts us with this abjection after we wait sitting in cold, clean well produced, gorgeous images that are familiar and otherworldly at the same time.
Barney and Violette both work with violence. I might have mentioned here before that Barney's work was described somewhere (or I made it up in my head but I don't think so) as 'violence sublimating into form.' I would say the same of Violette's work - violence is going through a different filtering process with the two artists.
A quote from Violette I found on Wikipedia:
"I'm interested in a visual language that's over-determined, exhausted, or just over-burdened by meaning. The heavy-handed one-to-one of 'black-equals-wrong' is incredibly interesting to me-- less as something that has a meaning in itself, but more in how those visual codes can somehow be reanimated. That's constant throughout my work. All those images are like zombies -- they're stripped of vitality, yet sometimes they get life back in them...and like zombies, usually something goes wrong when they awake again."
That is interesting -- he is stripping down (or boiling down) to something basic (like the use of black) and trying to reanimate it. I wonder if he has succeeded. I don't know. I only see stripped/boiled down right now. I don't see the zombie having come back from the dead.
I see boiled down death and violence - the leftover bones after the meat has cooked off.
I went to David Altmejd's show at Andrea Rosen about a month ago (top two row of images). I was first struck by the sculpture in the front entryway. It was the semblance of a human body - with repetition and body parts in all kinds of places as hands repeated as if their repetition was motion against the body. There was a gaping hole in the torso with the movement of the plaster frozen in movement outwards to show it had been dug out by those multiples of hands. There were multiple ears at the bottom of where the face would be and an plaster was frozen in air like a single angel wing behind the body. It felt as if this messy plaster being was caught in building its mutilated self and torn apart by itself all at the same time. There was a raw plaster feel - nothing fine tuned except some parts of the hands and feet which seemed to be made by casts.
It's funny - thinking back - the hands all seemed to be not an individual's hand but some kind of representation of what a hand would be in a dictionary...it was a perfect, regularly proportioned hand..it was a man's hand - not too big, not too small. The fingers were perfect lengths for the base of the hand...there seemed a lack of individuality. This is purely based on memory. I didn't take notes.
I very much enjoyed the show. I liked the raw plaster building/digging next to the very large plexiglass vitrines. (Two filled a nice sized room.) I liked the juxtaposition of rough plaster next to very clean and straight lines. There was something medical in the cleanliness, yet also playful- upon seeing rows of various brightly colored noses displayed, a colorful flower built of thread and sewn through holes drilled in plexi layers. Clean. Exact. The vitrines seemed to be the location of the factory - with us viewing the human(?) body being put together in mid stream - human(ish) hybrids being constructed in clear clean boxes. Yet, some of the human parts take over and escape as hands dig through the plaster the vitrines sit on - there is some chaos here. On the wall above the vitrines, a winged figure was scraped out the walls plaster, multiple hands doing the work.
The color brought in humor. The juxtaposition of materials did too --- the hair on some of the half made abominations was something like the werewolf hair above. It was fake and campy.
Altmejd is known for using werewolf hair and crystals and making human like monsters. (I don't exactly remember crystals in this show but I don't think it matters because according to an article I read - he doesn't use certain materials to be symbolic --- it's more about mood for him.)
Altmejd has been coined as Neo-Gothic (along with Sue de Beer, Banks Violette and I'd put Wim Delvoy in that mix). I am going to look into this movement further within this blog- I am attracted to all their work....probably the dark and grim aspects that exist in all their work.... Banks Violette supposedly made a melting unicorn head (as I did in college without knowing of his)...Sue de Beer makes well done special effects horror images that are photographed and Wim Delvoy has a dark intricacy within his over decorated dump trucks...and then their are the Xrays...
According to a Wmagazine article on Altmejd - he went to school with Sue de Beer and Banks Violette. They all went to the Columbia MFA program...I would like to look further into what is going on with that school...seems like a little movement that I like has been going on there.
In some readings about Altmejd:
From that same Wmagazine article (by Catherine Hong) -
Altmejd says "A lot of people think that I'm really fascinated by death and morbidity, but I'm much more interested in life. I just think that things look more alive when they're growing on top of what's dead."
I like this for some reason... After all, we are all mushrooms in many ways. Life and death are the same thing. Personally, I think I need to look more at death. It is coming up in Kristeva's Abject/Horror book - and I'm just now realizing how much humanity, in general, is all about death. I don't want to go with horror or something super direct though --- maybe...
On the subject of death (as much as Altmejd isn't into that - it is in his work - so I'm going with it) - I just read in a separate article by Art Agenda on Portikus presenting 'The Future of Tradition: Aranda, picasso, Matisse, Miro & Vidokle'. They mention a poem written by Miro in 1975 titled Adonides.
Here is the entire paragraph from Art Agenda (written by Thomas Stearns on May 3, 2011):
"Miro's Adonides (1975) presents a short two-stanza poem. It begins in a poverty of understanding: I ignore everything I know / and know nothing at all / of all that I ignore. Once affirmed, the poem continues: How can I / believe in death / when I know/ that you will die one day. Elegiacally the poet asks, since death is an unknowable, its absence can only be felt in the loss of a loved one, a loss to painful itself to even consider. Thus, death is an uncomfortable mystery. As such, the denial and anger aroused in passing can only be alienated through a mystical faith: the cycle of life and death made whole through incarnation and resurrection - the rebirth."
I love what the poet and the Stearns is saying about the poverty of understanding!!!!!!!!! But also his noticing that death is something we can't know - really know - unless faced with a loved one dying really speaks to me.
Back to Altmejd:
Wmagazine article again- continuing in the vein of Altmejd's work being about life that grows out of decay -
Altmejd says, "I think about decay not in a negative way, but in the sense of creating a space for things to start growing, " he explains. The furry time-ravaged corpse of his giant, for instance, is full of holes and caverns inhabited by birds and squirrels.".... Meanwhile, crystals, plants and sparkling beads seem to be sprouting from the giants' flesh, which his also punctured with shards of mirrored glass. The end result is something undoubtedly horrific but also strangely seductive."
Nancy Spector is quoted in this same article as saying:
"Though his work is quite different from Matthew Barney's, both artists share a regenerative vision, one that finds expression in grotesque beauty."
Maybe this is one of things about Barney's work that attracts me too... I think I look at cyborgs the same way... human adaption and growth - whether containing technology or the organic - it is about hybridity, movement and change, growth and finally, the body.
Additional quotes from the press release at Andrea Rosen:
'Altmejd's work mimics the complexity achieved in the natural world through the continual layering of elements and structures built up over millennia. Whether Altmejd begins from a point of symmetry or from a point of disorder, his works are ultimately shaped by the individual choices made at each point of construction. these works suggest the organic logic of the crowd where individual decisions can collectively generate a more intelligent whole.......Rather than creating terminal artworks, complete and ossified, Altmejd's works are manifestations of objects that are always transforming and forever open. Rather than crafting puzzles for viewer to solve, Altmejd generates structures and landscapes to inhabit.'
