Bivouac

Alex Hubbard, Sung Hwan Kim, Meiro Koizumi, Anna Molska, Lucy Raven, Sara VanDerBeek, and Steve Roden
Vox Populi, Philadelphia
March 6—April 26, 2009

Left: Ana Molska, Tanagrama, 2006/07, video, b&w, sound. 7 minutes, video still, courtesy of the artist

In addition to the works on view, a live performance, conversation, and screening of art-historically relevant films explored the potential of such ludic scenarios for formal and critical immediacy.

April 18, 2009
“Back to the Wasted Future,” a performance by Lucy Raven on biodiesel production in China past and present, followed by a concert with guest artists Sung Hwan Kim, David Michael DiGregorio (a.k.a. “dogr”) and Byungjun Kwon, and Philadelphia-based group Ashoke Sen. 


April 19, 2009
An afternoon screening of rare film/video works and performance documents that expand upon themes within the exhibition. Selected and introduced by writer and curator Jay Sanders in conversation with Fionn Meade. Selections included works by Ericka Beckman, Bruce Nauman and William Allan, Superstudio, Olivier Husain, Mauricio Kagel, Ron Amstutz, and others.

Departing from an 1896 George Méliès short that no longer exists, Bivouac included film and video, photography, sculpture and drawings that utilize simple backdrops, meager sets, and improvised structures to position the performing body in tension with abstraction and fragmented attempts at narration. As the films of René Clair and Hans Richter once revised and expanded Méliès’ personification of objects and rudimentary theatrical effects, these contemporary works update and complicate tactics borrowed from Constructivist, Dadaist, and Fluxus-like approaches.

Taken from a nineteenth century French word for temporary encampments, the term bivouac signifies both a rapidly constructed shelter and an ability to improvise with what is readily at hand; derived, in turn, from the German ‘biwacht’, the term also implies the secondary watch of an advance guard or an alternative vantage point, all inflections which provide entry into the range of ludic scenarios on view. Diverse in reference and style, a formal adjacency binds the artists’ respective practices loosely together as strategies of estrangement, appropriation, and abstraction exist alongside direct engagements with materiality, figuration, and task-oriented performance.

In Anna Molska’s Tanagram, 2006/07, the viewer encounters two muscular young men wearing only pads and futuristic helmets as they work together to arrange seven large blocks into a series of geometric shapes. Alluding to Malevich’s stage designs for the Futurist play Victory Over the Sun, 1913, and his infamous “Black Square” painting of 1915, the video also parodies the disciplinary drills that often characterize military service; set to a pulsing soundtrack that mixes the boisterous shouts of the Red Army choir with snippets of electronica and a dubbed dialogue extracted from a Soviet era Polish-Russian language instruction recording—Molska’s exercise underscores the fraught historical relationship between Russia’s avant-garde heritage and the artist’s native Poland.

Steve Roden, stills from anything else &/or nothing at all (drawing circles for jackson mac low), 2006, ink, scratching, and tape on pre-existing 16mm film, transferred to DVD, sound. 16 minutes, video stills, courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles

Steve Roden’s anything else &/or nothing at all (drawing circles for jackson mac low), 2006, interprets a Fluxus score by the concrete poet Mac Low in the form of a direct animation layered on top of an existing 1950s educational film titled “drawing the circle.” Responding to an invitation to work with the Fluxus archives at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Roden—a painter, sculptor, and sound artist—construed a process that transposed each letter, number, and symbol of Mac Low’s score into an equivalent color, mark, and duration for altering the found film. With the aid of a magnifying glass but not having projected the film itself, Roden’s ink layering incorporates chance effects with the highly prescribed motions of the film to create a nuanced visual rhythm of gesture and abstraction. A series of drawings—made according to rule-based procedures that extend from the artist’s body—complement the animation.

Left: Sara VanDerBeek, Eclipse 1, 2008 , digital c-print, 20” x 16”, courtesy of the artist and D’Amelio Terras Gallery, NY
Right: Sara VanDerBeek, Eclipse 3, 2008, digital c-print, 20” x 16”, courtesy of the artist and D’Amelio Terras Gallery, NY

The images captured in Sara VanDerBeek photographs are comprised of discrete sculptural set-ups that deftly reference figurative effigy, appropriated imagery, and modernist abstraction. Assembling diminutive sculptural armatures in order to photograph them, VanDerBeek culls from her own archive of found imagery, discarded ephemera, and pre-fabricated materials, often juxtaposing thrifted items and magazine and book cut-outs with fetish finishes that recall, in turn, Minimalist sculpture, Constructivist theater platforms, Tatlinesque wall reliefs, and totem styles from around the world. As such, the photographs document temporary, precariously balanced monuments.

Lucy Raven, stills from Preenactment (4 Leaps: Model Industries 1977/2008; Earthworks 1976/2008; Production and Class Struggle 1974/2008; Summer Olympic Games 1973/2008) video, color, sound. 39 minutes, courtesy of the artist

Investigating the agitprop strategies of Mao Zedong’s “Cultural Revolution,” Lucy Raven’s Preenactment, 2008, re-contextualizes four picture books of Chinese propaganda from the 1970s that promoted agriculture, industry, sport and the heroic role of the worker. Produced as an attempt to counter the catastrophic failures of “The Great Leap Forward”—a quixotic effort on Mao’s part to transform China from an agrarian economy into an industrialized society that resulted in widespread famine and unrest in the early 1960s—these agitprop photo-tableaux were widely distributed to convey a vision of the future devoid of intellectual pursuits and traditional culture, replaced instead by the unanimity of Red Guard collective activities. Positioned above, the video camera shows the artist’s hands leafing methodically through anachronistic artifacts of a failed utopia—allowing the “preenactment” to make its case while the low murmur of a digital playlist on shuffle lingers in the background.

Sung Hwan Kim, stills from Dog Video, 2006, video, color, sound. 7 minutes, courtesy of the artist

Sung Hwan Kim’s Dog Video, 2006, enacts an abstract comparison between two homes—one in Amsterdam and one in Seoul—and the house rules that apply in each domain. Part of Kim’s “In the Room” performance-based video series, 2006/07, Dog Video takes place in an everyday apartment environment but tells an oneiric story of subordination, bodily imposition, and loss. Employing makeshift props and costumes, a fragmented, episodic narrative is played out between two young men who pantomime acts of heeling through erotic subjugation, paternal scolding, and references to 17th century Dutch painting.

Meiro Koizumi, stills from Craftnight, 2008, video, color, sound. 15 minutes, courtesy of the artist

In Craftnight, 2008, Meiro Koizumi invites a Tokyo man to share an intimate memory while under the duress of blunt questioning and sculptural directives. Elliptical in structure, a series of brief interludes show a man seated at a table before the simple backdrop of a green velvet curtain. He is repeatedly directed by an off-camera voice to begin again, attempting to mold a representative figure from a block of clay while conveying stories of his father’s absence throughout childhood. Not allowed to let go of the abstract mass for the entire duration of the interrogation, the man grows increasingly agitated as his anecdotes reveal more and more repressed details from his past. A series of related collages invert the Snow White fairytale into contrasting scenes of burial and levitation.

Left: Alex Hubbard, stills from Dos Nacionales, 2008, single-channel video, sound, 3:30 minutes, courtesy of the artist Right: Bivouac, Installation view (paintings by Alex Hubbard)

Alex Hubbard’s recent videos present overhead views of private performances as a flurry of assembled and destroyed materials rifle through painting and sculptural procedures, creating a “Buster Keaton on a tabletop” aesthetic that updates flatbed and scatter strategies extending back to figures as diverse as Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Barry Le Va. Edited into a series of jump cuts and trick-shot reversals, Hubbard layers foley sound effects appropriated from cinema onto his performance outtakes, creating an allover immediacy both comic and jarring. Also included is a new video, Weekend Pass, 2008, that features a continuous tracking shot of a pedestal under attack, along with a selection of recent paintings.

Download the PDF: The Forgotten Gesture