"Things Fall Apart," image courtesy of Paul Chan.
Things Fall Apart@
Winkleman Gallery 637 West 27th Street, Suite A
New York, NY 10001
Ground Floor
Between 11th and 12th Avenues
January 16 – February 21, 2009
Opening reception: Friday, January 16, 6-8pm.
Featuring work by
Stephen Andrews
Paul Chan + The Front
Mounir Fatmi
Yevgeniy Fiks
Joy Garnett
Susan Hefuna
Christopher Lowry Johnson
Carlos Motta
Renata Poljak
Susan Silas
Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present Things Fall Apart, a group exhibition curated by Joy Garnett.
Things Fall Apart takes its title from a line in a well-known poem by William Butler Yeats1
that warns of ominous forces unleashed in the political vacuum
following World War I. The poem reverberates in twentieth and twenty
first century literature and culture, from Chinua Achebe’s eponymous
novel2 about African societies giving way under colonialism, to Joan Didion’s collection of essays on California in the 1960s3, to Oliver Stone’s Nixon. Allusions to the poem regularly color news items, notably The Economist’s cover story after the U.S. market collapse, and New York Times articles covering the failed war in Iraq, the increasing dysfunction of the U.S. right wing political axis, and the spread of the current economic crisis to global markets.
If Yeats' poetic imagery and its subsequent iterations seethe with
foreboding and even despair, by contrast, the international group of
artists presented in Things Fall Apart mark precipitous global power
shifts in their work while positing the darkest moments—when things
fall apart—as salient points of departure for change.
The graphically political work of Mounir Fatmi
(Morocco) directly addresses the constructed political hierarchies at
hand: flags of each of the G8 nations are poised like so many icons of
power atop push-brooms, symbolizing the burden placed upon those who
bear the brunt of the global decision-making system, and emphasizing
its forced semblance of equilibrium. Global power dynamics and the
intricate process of enemy construction are likewise made legible in
the oil paintings of Yevgeniy Fiks (Russia), which point to a forgotten moment in U.S. history
(1943-1944) when the goals of the American and Soviet propaganda
machines coincided; the story turns poignantly on the ironic twist
provided during the McCarthy hearings, when artists fulfilling that particular
call to patriotism were rewarded by being blacklisted.
Nationalist propaganda is again repurposed as so much raw material when
Joy Garnett (USA) re-invents the candy-coated public relations
photographs from the Yangtse Three Gorges Development Corporation
website in a series of oil paintings that show the earth itself giving
way in the widening gyre of China’s monumental and controversial public
works project.
Plucked from televised footage of the earliest US bombardment of Iraq after 9/11, the drawings of Stephen Andrews
(Canada) signal the coming of the Americans as “liberators” with a
mixture of horror and humor, focusing on those instants, magnified by
the media, when everything changes irrevocably. Paul Chan (USA/Hong Kong) and members of the New Orleans-based artist-run collective The Front4 present a selection of drawings, prints and photographs direct from the Ninth Ward, NOLA's
ground zero. Displayed salon-style, these works combine images of
destruction and displacement, personal memory and political
disturbance, reflecting the people and places of the Gulf Coast in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
In her new dual-channel video installation, Renata Poljak
(Croatia) explores the intersections of the personal and the political,
identity and nationalism, by juxtaposing the escalating collapse of a
fictional relationship with the suppressed history and memory of the
war between Serbia and Croatia. Susan Silas (USA/Hungary)
inverts memories of past barbarism through a haunting retrospective
lens with her series of paired photographs that reunite images from the
Olympic Stadium in what was once West Berlin, with images from the
Jewish Cemetery at Weißensee, in what used to be East Berlin. The
layered, transparent drawings of multimedia artist Susan Hefuna
(Egypt/Germany) play on metaphors of separateness and stereotypes of
otherness through the filter of her dual heritage; multiple vantage
points and interpretations—from the Modernist grid to Orientalist
mystification—infuse her abstract renderings of mashrabiya
screens, a traditional Islamic latticework window element that allow a
building’s inhabitants to observe the outside world while remaining
hidden.
Carlos Motta’s (Colombia) stacked, mass-produced newspapers comprehensively list the history of U.S. global
interventions in Latin America in print form, offering a bloody
inventory of counterinsurgency, weapons use, psychological warfare,
interrogation and environmental degradation; the broadsheet points to
the production of alternative histories, and suggests both the
potential power as well as possible limitations of distributing
information freely to the public. In his latest series of oil paintings
drawn from news items covering the implosion of derelict buildings
across the country, Christopher Lowry Johnson (USA) zeros-in on
our brute fascination with physical destruction, while suggesting a
climactic end to the era of American global dominance. Brimming with
the heartbreaking drama of a lost “Americana,” this work evokes a once
powerful and alluring past now very much past its prime and facing the
prospect of being torn down in order to start anew.
1.
THE SECOND COMING
By W.B. Yeats (1920)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
2. Achebe, Chinua. 1958. Things fall apart. London [u.a.]: Heinemann.
3. Didion, Joan. 1968. Slouching towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
4. The 14 artists who form The Front are Kyle Bravo, Andrea Ferguson,
Rachel Jones, Morgana King, Jenny Le Blanc, Michelle Levine, Jennifer
Odem, Stephanie Patton, Julie Pieri, Claire Rau, Jeff Rinehart, Megan
Roniger, Natalie Sciortino and Jonathan Traviesa. The Front is located
at 4100 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans, LA 70117. More info:
http://www.nolafront.org/
