Streetwise

June 23 – August 6, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 23, 6p – 8p
Performance: June 23, 7:30p
(featuring Darman Lopez & Artist Susana Barbará)
Ground Floor, Gallery 2

Curated by Elga Wimmer

Download Streetwise Press Release

Read about our feature in Chelsea Now here!

The streets, serving as the pulsing veins of our cities, bring the public and private together and reflect social and political reality. Streets are a modern arena for the unexpected, an area of contradictions. As a result, they are seen as a specific territory for freedom. Every day, people get out of their “boxes” – also known as homes – and mix in the streets, where all social groups collide like molecules that eventually cohere and form a society.

The artists in Streetwise use streets to examine the diverse feelings — such as hope, love, happiness as well as fear and anxiety — that make up our personal and collective experience. All over the world, the streets of big cities look similar; all have both a dark and a light side. The artists use different tactics
to communicate these complex social issues to audiences that are often unaware of the fact that they are a part of an artistic project.

Oleg Kulik’s Reservoir Dog (filmed during the opening of the show Signs and Wonder: Niko Pirosmani and Contemporary Art, Kunsthaus, Zurich; March 30, 1995), shows the action of the dog-artist howling at the entrance of what he calls the “Swiss Bank of Arts.” It was his protest of the transformation of an artist’s life into material value, against art as commodity. Kulik was arrested and spent a night in prison.

In the Miyata Jiro Project, Japanese artist Momoyo Torimitsu uses the stereotypical image of Japanese businessmen. Titling her pieces, such as Business in Rio de Janeiro (2001), after the various cities in which they were performed, the artist made a life-size crawling robot that provoked reactions from onlookers in the streets, thus revealing their own cultural preconceptions.

In B.A.Ches (Potholes) (2008) by Marta Ares and Susana Barbará, a couple dances tango around the potholes in the streets of Buenos Aires. Wittily and ironically this video points to situations that bother us in our daily lives — from dog poop on the sidewalks to neighbors and politics — and suggests that we resort to tango and “dance around the difficulties.”

Hank Willis Thomas and Kambui Olujimi’s Winter in America (2006) video project consists of a stop-motion animation video and still photographs that work together to depict the 2002 robbery and murder of Thomas’s cousin Songha Thomas Willis. This tragic event is enacted by G.I. Joe action figures, ironically used by the artists to play out the violent narratives. The work directly critiques our culture’s relationship with violence, especially its prevalence in simulated forms in mass culture and toys.

All over the world, streets are home for people living on the edge, like the homeless adolescents in Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry’s Endurance (2003) or the prostitutes and transvestites in Alexander Apóstol’s Avenida de Libertador (2006) (a very symbolic name, since “libertador” means freedom). Streets have no borders, no rules, and anything could happen here. In both videos, the protagonists communicate their stories, from the tragic to the humorous.

The “global village” era has witnessed a multitude of new problems — violence, homelessness, traffic — which plague every big city. In her video Beijing Moscow (2004), Solange Fabião reflects upon and compares a common issue of both cities — traffic. In his video Bandits (2005), Tiong Ang depicts the next level of the traffic problem — the increasing pollution that many Asian cities have to face in their rise to modernization. It is a nervous, always moving, and ever-changing recording of motorcyclists in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, focuses on riders with masks on their faces. The continuous images of masked riders evoke a sense of resistance and illegality.

Traffic is one of the manifestations of our everyday life. In June Bum Park’s III Crossing (2002), real-world events on the street intersection appear to be manipulated by an enormous hand from above. Large fingers become the barrier between pedestrians and traffic as cars are scooted along.

This is the most unbelievable feature of streets: nothing can stop the everyday routine. Whatever happens, life continues. In Miss Turkey (2005), Halil Altindere charges the main pedestrian street in Istanbul, Istiklal Caddesi, from one end to the other, with imaginary moments that fleetingly disrupt the mundane and the routine. A beauty queen bikes up and down the street and two businessmen break into a rap dance in a theater of the absurd.

On the streets, people also try their luck in the lottery, as seen in Jonathan Calm’s Scratching Chance (2005). The artists use humor and irony to communicate to their audiences. In Jillian McDonald’s Horror Makeup (2006), a figure transforms into a zombie or monster while riding the L train into Brooklyn, suggesting that New York subways seem to be the strange gutter of big city streets.

On the streets or underground, you can meet anyone from freaks to saints, according to Sonia Khurana’s video Flower Carrier III (2006). Influenced by Milan Kundera’s novel, the artist walks on the streets of Barcelona carrying a flower. Though people on the streets think she is crazy and laugh at her, she tries to focus on the beauty of a flower alone — a way for Kundera’s protagonist to escape the dark and ugly side of the street and life.

Hope is a very important theme, especially when streets become a place of not only anxieties but real fears, like the streets of New York in the aftermath of the World Trade Tower attacks. In her video The Day After 9/11, Perry Bard portrays Canal Street in New York on the day following the disaster, where life has to continue as usual despite this catastrophe.

Close to 100 years ago in his novel Amerika, Kafka portrayed the streets and public places of big cities as sites of corruption, deceit, fatality, intrigue and strange encounters. Yet suddenly on the horizon, as a symbol of hope and freedom, appeared the Statue of Liberty rising high above New York Harbor, giving confidence and strength to Kafka’s protagonist. The artists in Streetwise tell us stories and reflect on all aspects of human behavior displayed in the streets and public places of today’s cities. Apart from the progress of modern technology, has so much changed since Kafka’s time?

Elga Wimmer, Chief Curator
Chelsea Art Museum, New York, NY

Featured Artists:
Halil Altindere, Tiong Ang, Alexander Apóstol, Marta Ares and Susana Barbará, Perry Bard, Jonathan Calm, Solange Fabião, Sonia Khurana, Oleg Kulik, Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, Jillian McDonald, June Bum Park, Hank Willis Thomas and Kambui Olujimi, and Momoyo Torimitsu.