MAKE NICE
WEEK 1
WEEK 2
WEEK 3
WEEK 4
WEEK 5
WEEK 6
WEEK 7
WEEK 8
WEEK 9
WEEK FIVE:
RAINER GANAHL*
(VIDEOBOX) Arthur Zmijewski
AUGUST 3rd -AUGUST 7th
Opening reception: Wednesday, August 4th 6-8 pm
Curated by Norman Kleeblatt, Curator of Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum
*With
help from White
Box Local 525
Despite
the overload of information and the speed with which it circulates today,
the main vehicles for dissemination remain text and image.
Rainer Ganahl's art is devoted to language and communication. Underscoring the political and physical threats to the United States since September 11, 2001, Bushisms (2003-4) offers an archive of sound bites that have become embedded in our vernacular through the media. Working within a conceptual framework, Ganahl makes these work-intensive drawings with a ball point pen. The nervous lines evoke the anxious environment that these polemical phrases have created.
By contrast to Ganahl's textual framework, Arthur Zmijewski's work is based solely on the image. His videos hover between documentary and fiction. Zmijewski's Game of Tag (1999) sets up an impossible situation that examines human nature at its most revealing and its most starkly vulnerable. His filming in the loaded spaces of Holocaust atrocity avoids any hint of nostalgia or direct reference to the historic tragedy. Rather, it reminds us of the persistence of man's myriad inhumanities. Although filmed more than five years ago, Game of Tag hauntingly foreshadows the disgraceful situations recently revealed in the media.
- Norman Kleeblatt
More information about Rainer Ganahl