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Radcliffe Bailey Storm at Sea 2007 Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery New York © Radcliffe Bailey |
The exhibition includes many striking works. Rising to the fore is Radcliffe Bailey’s Storm at Sea, an installation created with pieces of wood that at first look like discarded lumber but which one realizes on reflection are piano keys. These keys rise up from the ground in a kind of messy wave, on which a dark sailing ship rests. On the opposite end of this rickety wooden trajectory is a small African sculpture. And on the wall rests a metronome stilled via a permanently tipped base. Bailey’s choice of materials in terms of those silenced black-and-white keys is very effective in conveying the sense of something intricate, beautiful, ordered and whole having been rended asunder. And rended asunder not for a grand kind of creation, but only to serve as simple sticks might. Very sad.
There are other works, too, that prove immediately effective. James Lee Byars’ Halo is a magnificent golden circle propped casually against a wall, inspiring awe whether one believes in angels or not. José Bedia’s The Things that Drag Me Down is a large installation in which cargo-loaded dugout canoes and model planes pull away from a large figure they are chained to on the wall. Though the migratory subject matter is grim—the chains promise to pull off the figure’s skin once they get far enough away—Bedia’s imaginatively arranged cargo impresses. Small 747s bear cigarettes and cigars on their wings, while boats ferry rows of rum bottles, taxidermied animals and exotic horns and feathers. Overall, it forms the kind of joyful-seeming offering that ends up tearing psyches apart rather than uniting them together. Robert Gober’s sunset-lit prison window, placed high up on one wall, conjures a perfectly mixed feeling of longing, and William Cordova’s found-wood shack with delicate gold chains and books edging out from its base seems to prove a poverty that holds its own form of great riches.
Particularly compelling as well was Tania Bruguera’s Delayed Patriotism, photographs of random people holding a hooded eagle as they stand in front of different black-and-white portraits. The full process is documented on a nearby video, with the portraits explained to be largely unknown political leaders. But the snapshots alone intrigue with the reference towards archaic forms and symbols of power, ones also randomly awarded and arrayed.
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Rebecca Belmore Fringe 2008 Courtesy of the artist |
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