SOCIÉTÉ
SOCIÉTÉ TRISHA BAGA 1985 born in Venice, FL / Works in New York, NY 2010 MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, NY 2007 BFA Cooper Union School of Art , NY Solo Exhibitions 2015 Société / Berlin (forthcoming) 2014 Free Internet / Gio Marconi / Milan Zabludowicz Collection / London 2013 Gravity / Peep-Hole / Milan Florida / Société / Berlin 2012 Holiday / Dundee Contemporary Arts / Dundee The Biggest Circle / Greene Naftali Gallery / New York Plymouth Rock 2 / Whitney Museum of American Art / New York World Peace / Kunstverein München / Munich Rock / Vilma Gold / London 2011 Trisha Baga: Performative Screening / EAI / New York Screenings and Group Exhibitions 2014 Private settings / Art after the Internet / Museum of Modern Art / Warsaw High Performance / curated by Bernhard Serexhe & Julia Stoschek / Riga Art Space / Riga Forget Amnesia (with Jessica Stead) / Volcano Extravaganza festival / Fiorucci Art Trust / Stromboli Sequence 5 / Miguel Abreu Gallery / New York High Performance / curated by Bernhard Serexhe & Julia Stoschek / Julia Stoschek Collection at ZKM / Düsseldorf That Singing Voice / curated by Matt Moravec / Galería Marta Cervera / Madrid Apples and Pears / Drei / Cologne 2013 The Stand In (or A Glass of Milk) / Public Fiction / Los Angeles Freak Out / Green Naftali / New York Frieze Sounds Program / London Trisha Baga & Jessie Stead / Speculations on Anonymous Materials / Friedericianum / Kassel Trisha Baga / Meanwhile......Suddenly and Then / 12th Biennale de Lyon / curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran / Lyon TRISHA BAGA & NO BROW / Galerie Emanuel Layr / Vienna Hercules Radio / Frieze Sounds Program / New York The Magnificient Obsession / MART / Rovereto Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ 2012 Paraphantoms / Temporary Gallery / Cologne New Pictures of Common Objects / MoMA PS1 / New York Inside Out / Kunsthaus Dresden / Dresden Troubling Spaces / Zabludowicz Collection / London Soundworks / Institute of Contemporary Art / London Entrance Entrance / Temple Bar and Gallery / Dublin Between Commissions / The Cornerhouse / Manchester You Told Me the Other Night / Wst street Gallery / New York 2011 This is Tomorrow / Annarumma Gallery / Naples Open File / Grand Union / Birmingham Sandwich pedestrian mysticism sandwich sonata / Johann Koenig Gallery / Berlin The Event / Grand Union / Birmingham Fernando / Franklin Street Works / Stamford Hasta Mañana / Greene Naftali Gallery / New York 14 & 15 / Curated by David Muenzer / The Lipstick Building / New York The Great White Way Goes Black / Vilma Gold / London Trisha Baga / Migration Forms Festival / Anthology Film Archives / New York Rectangle with the Sound of Its Own Making / The Fourth Wall at Vox Populi / Philadelphia Alias / Bunker Sztuki / Contemporary Art Museum of Krakow / Krakow 2010 En el Barrio de Gavin Black through evas arche und der Feminist / Gavin Brown´s Enterprise / Curated by Pati Hertling / New York In the Company of / Curated by Terri Smith / Housatonic Museum of Art / Bridgeport The Pursuer / Greene Naftali Gallery / New York Greater New York Cinema Program / PS1 / New York Beside Himself / Curated by Terri Smith / Ditch Projects / Springfield Hardcorps: Movement Research Festival 2010 / Center for Performance Research / New York Alphabet Soup / The Creative Alliance / Baltimore A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the Filmography of James O.Incandenza / The Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University / New York 2009 Adventures Close to Home / Curated by Peggy Ahwesh / Anthology Film Archives / New York Los Solos II / Curated by Bonnie Jones / The Load of Fun Theater / Baltimore The Fuzzy Set / Curated by Pilar Conde / LAXART / Los Angeles Then and Now / LGBT Community Center / New York 2008 Our Bodies / Our Selves / Curated by A.L. Steiner / El Centro Cultural Montehermoso / Vitoria-Gasteiz Betweeen Us… / Curated by Meghan Dellacrosse / Leo Koenig Gallery / Andes Salad Days 3 / Artist’s Space / New York Intermission / Art-In-General’s Audio in the Elevator Program / New York 2007 Thank God for My Beautiful Black Locks of Golden Black Hair / Cooper Union’s Houghton Gallery / New York Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ Commisions 2009 Love Affair of the Painter Balla and a Chair / Futurist Life: Redux for Performa 09 / Anthology Film Archives and SFMoMA iShowU09 / Alexander McQueen for Target Launch Event / Curated by Sofia Hernandez Bibliography 2014 Nathan, Emily / The shape of things / ARTnews / October / p 96 - 103 Casavecchia, Barbara / Trisha Baga’s Free Internet at Gio Marconi / Review / Art Agenda / July Croomer, Martin and Barnes, Freire / Time Out London / Women Artists on the Cutting Edge / March Devine, Tom / Made In Camden / The Zabludowicz Collection / Exhibition Review / March Review on Trisha Baga at Zabludowicz Collection, London / Fad / March 2013 Davies-Crook, Susanna / Exhibition of the week: Trisha Baga at Societe Berlin / Dazed Digital / May Irrgang, Christina / Paraphantoms / Temporary Gallery / Frieze d/e / Issue Nr. 8 / February-March Malouf, Mathieu / Attitude Becomes Dorm / Trisha Baga at Greene Naftali / Texte Zur Kunst / Issue Nr. 89 / March / p 199 2012 Jaskey, Jenny / Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2 at the Whitney Museum / Mousse Magazine / December Vying for Fluency in Many Languages / The New York Times / December Review / Trisha Baga: Holiday, DCA, Dundee / Herald Scotland / December Review / Trisha Baga - „World Peace“ / Monopol / Spring Review / Trisha Baga: Rock / Time Out London / June Review / Trisha Baga: Rock / Blouin Artinfo / April 2011 Rosales, Esperanza / Nice to meet you - Trisha Baga / Hands-on / Mousse Magazine / Nr. 31 / November Rutland, Beau / Hasta Mañana / Art Forum / October Review / Trisha Baga / Fourth Wall / Tan / January 2007 Strouse, Allen / Viral Video / Review / Artinfo / November Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] Awards and Scholarships 2011 Louise Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award / New York SOCIÉTÉ 2008 Joan Mitchell Foundation Scholarship / Atlantic Center for the Arts / New Smyrna Beach 2007 MFA Fellowship / Bard College / New York 2007 Burckhardt Foundation Award / The Cooper Union / New York 2003 – 2007 Cooper Union Full Tuition Scholarship / The Cooper Union / New York Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] ARTNEWS SOCIÉTÉ The Shape of Things 1/4 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ To prepare for a solo exhibition last summer at Société Berlin, 28-year-old Trisha Baga showed up with her laptop, a few hard drives containing an arsenal of found and manufactured sound bites, animations, video clips, and still images, and one small box full of garbage. “It’s garbage I could only find in America,” says the Bushwick-based artist, explaining that she prefers to acquire most of her physical materials from local shops and manufacturers, and that she uses them as shapes, rather than identifiable items. “I even brought a big tub of Cheez Balls to be an orange form,” she adds. Alone in the gallery while the staff was busy with art fairs, Baga got down to work, weaving her varied digital sources—many of which she filmed herself with a 3-D camera—into disorienting, choppily edited video projections. Her signature technique, perhaps best described as multimedia installation, combines these moving collages with sculpture, painting, sound, and seemingly haphazard arrangements of the everyday trinkets she has collected, spread across the gallery floor. As the projected images shift and flicker against the wall, they collide with the static, anthropomorphic shadows cast by the objects set purposefully in their way—obsolete speakers, tangled wires, pizza boxes, lamps, plastic toys—and a steady dialogue is generated between physical and digital worlds. “My stuff is about transitions,” Baga says. “It’s about different layers and mediums touching each other, like different bodies. A painting is an object; it’s really resolute. But a projection seems sexual,” she adds, “like it’s licking and wrapping itself around everything. I think there is something very romantic about that.” In conjunction with her first solo show at Chelsea’s Greene Naftali Gallery in 2012, Baga’s 3-D video installation Plymouth Rock (2012) was presented in the Whitney Museum’s lobby gallery. Inspired by the historic time-ravaged rock that was considered by many a monument to freedom and a symbol of patriotic pride, the piece includes fragmented images of journeys: a glowing jellyfish flapping through a dark sea; a man with a metal detector seeking treasure on the beach. But the symbolic grandness of these visuals is brought to ground by the silhouettes of ordinary objects slumping and hunching against them, as haunting notes from the American Beauty soundtrack fade into footsteps, gusts of wind, and labored breathing. Born in Venice, Florida, Baga is skilled in producing material whose superficial playfulness belies its substantial conceptual underpinnings. Her Berlin exhibition, “An Inconvenient Trash,” was ostensibly a satire based on Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and it featured numerous room-size installations and 3-D projections. Despite the abundance of pop music (including appearances by Cher and Madonna), cute graphics, and decontextualized monologues from Gore’s original film, the works on view offered surprisingly sincere, poetic reflections on consumer culture and environmental degradation. The Bather (2013), for example, allots 14 minutes to a steady, bird’s-eye view of small bits of colored paper as they float languidly down into a water-filled claw-foot tub. Lifted occasionally on updrafts, the confetti flutters at varying speeds, cutting angles across the frame or quivering as wildly as Aspen leaves. As each scrap lands on the water, its dye is released and seeps across the surface like rivers viewed from space. Pigments merge and swirl together in gentle eddies that evoke oil spills, melting icebergs, and a polluted planet colored by waste as toxic as it is vibrant. 2/4 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ Although there is technically no performance involved, Baga’s practice is extremely performative, requiring the active coordination of shadow, light, color, moving image, object, and sound, often with minimal preparation. “I basically made the Berlin show during the two weeks of install,” she says. “Everything behaves so differently when it’s small, viewed in my studio or on my computer, and when it’s large—so I try to wait as long as I can to make those decisions. It makes my studio practice a lot more free in that way, because then it just feels like exercising or something, trying different combinations and remembering what looks good.” Located in a large Bushwick loft building, just off a main street lined with bodegas, Baga’s studio looks more like the warehouse for a craft store than a functioning workspace. Inside, floor-to-ceiling windows are draped with black fabric, and every inch of surface is covered with piles of construction paper, empty beer cans, cleaning supplies, takeout-food boxes, fabric, tubes of paint, and clay sculptures. The only place to sit is the floor—and that is where Baga likes to work, crouched next to her laptop and a projector aimed permanently at her “exercise” wall, which retains traces of earlier productions, like faint eraser marks. Bits of old tape, dried expanses of paint, and nails obscure and deflect whatever she projects there, so the slate for her work is never entirely blank. Overlapping soundtracks blare from the speakers of a rocking video-game chair she found on the street and hooked up to her computer. Due to the nature of Baga’s art, there are no finished works in sight—but every broken lawn ornament, bottle of glitter, and packet of hot sauce seethes with potential. Once objects have entered her orbit, they become not only rehearsal props but also actors, waiting to be cast in some future production; in the meantime, they clutter her space like nascent ideas. Her process is one of trial and error, vision and revision, a constant state of adjustment. “I think it’s knowing that the environment makes better decisions than I do,” she says, as she hits the projector’s ON switch and cues up the footage from an eight-minute video, An Inconvenient Trash (2013), that was included in the 2013 Lyon Biennial. “Let’s try it with the music from Harry Potter,” she muses, gesturing toward the DVD menu screen on her computer’s desktop. Projected on the wall, the former vice-president turns toward the camera. “I’ve been trying to tell this story for a long time,” he says, and Baga—improvising—fades in the Harry Potter theme song, its melody swelling in an impassioned crescendo. “I’m cinematic,” she says. “I think that movie scores, especially popular Hollywood movie scores, just elongate the space of looking at a picture. If they work right, you don’t really hear them—they’re like MSG. They’re flavor enhancers.” When Gore addresses a color-coded map of the United States, Baga jumps up, grabs a twisted wire hanger from the floor, and dangles it from a nail in the wall, stepping back and adjusting until its serpentine shadow, cast across the projection, echoes the path of the Mississippi River. 3/4 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ In the summer of 2012, during a stretch of 90-degree nights, Baga’s studio flooded. “I had no natural disaster to blame,” she says. “A plastic cup got stuck in a drainpipe on the roof. But I had just made this book, The Great Pam, and it’s actually kind of nice because it turned out to be like an archive of everything in my studio just before it got ruined.” Released over the summer by Société Berlin—it debuted at Art Basel in June—and named after both The Great Gatsby and the artist’s sister, Pam, the outside cover suggests a vintage copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. Inside, as the story progresses, our view of each page zooms out incrementally and is increasingly dominated by cutout digital photographs of detritus from Baga’s studio. Googly eyes, gemstones, nail polish, a BIC lighter, green yarn, and an empty Doritos bag dart in and out of the lines of text and appear to mingle on the page like living creatures, until the narrative gives way almost completely to nonsensical, Photoshopped compositions. “The book is based on a mess, the root of it is chaos,” Baga says, adding that she didn’t design the pages herself. Instead, she sent her friend, a graphic designer, to her studio when she was away, gave him a “script” of actions to complete—“put Gatsby on the scanner, take a picture, put any two objects to your right on the scanner, take a photo, etc.”—and left the rest to chance. All of her work is marked by that same context contingency, which acknowledges the many layers and polyvocal nature of experience. “Lately I’ve been thinking about the synchronization of things,” she says. “You’re in a Laundromat, and the TV is on, and you can attribute the voices to other things like the washing machine. You put in a rhythm with your eyes, looking back and forth between two loads, and suddenly it becomes a drama between wet whites and dry colors.” Baga was raised in Florida by her Filipino-immigrant parents. Her father is a doctor, and her mother a housewife who “cooks and watches soap operas,” she says. “So I grew up watching a lot of those.” After graduating with an M.F.A. from Bard in 2010 (she received a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union in 2007), Baga lived for many years in New York’s East Village with her sister, who was enrolled in an accelerated nursing program at NYU. She recently moved into her Brooklyn studio, and she sleeps there amid all the chaos. “My dad is a radiologist,” she says. “He spends his whole day in a dark room looking for patterns—and I do the same thing. That’s really how we are able to talk about things.” Emily Nathan Originally published in ARTnews, October 2014 4/4 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ Art Agenda Trisha Baga´s “Free Internet” at Giò Marconi, Milan Trisha Baga, Mouth, 2014. Two video projections and installation with various objects, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Giò Marconi, Milan “Free Internet,” Trisha Baga’s exhibition at Giò Marconi, is a scrappy, energetic, stoned out tour de force in visual stimulation. “Free Internet,” Trisha Baga’s exhibition at Giò Marconi, is a scrappy, energetic, stoned out tour de force in visual stimulation. Behind 3D glasses, your eyes have Behind 3D glasses, your eyes have to move fast in order to focus on her continuous ping-pong of vacillating images: floating to move fast in order to focus on her continuous ping-pong of vacillating images: floating slices of salami, overlapping images, bats in caves, cats at night, partying slicesicons of salami, images, bats in caves, catslike, at night, partying animals, icons jumping at you, animals, jumping atoverlapping you, and internet search results with keywords “where is my vagina?”—which immediately reminded me ofand artistinternet Nam Junesearch Paik’s 1962 hand-scrawled composition Danger Musicis formy Dick Higgins: “Creep intoimmediately the VAGINA ofreminded a living WHALE.”(1) Sounds, glitches, radio feeds, samples of results with keywords like, “where vagina?”—which me of artist Nam June Paik’s 1962 handlaughter, and songs contribute to the work’s overall synesthesia. It’s like browsing through a chronology of fragments of “reality,” or whatever that means in the age scrawled composition Danger Music for Dick Higgins: “Creep into the VAGINA of a living WHALE.”(1) Sounds, glitches, of the Oculus Rift. radio feeds, samples of laughter, and songs contribute to the work’s overall synesthesia. It’s like browsing through a chronol- Andogy indeed, once inside the “Is this real?” becomes athat persistent question. must borrow the term from art historian Michael Baxandall—our “period of fragments ofshow, “reality,” or whatever means in theThis age of be—to the Oculus Rift. eye.” Baxandall first introduced this term in 1972 to characterize the impact of cultural factors on our ways of processing visual data and understanding pictures.(2) He argued, for instance, that during the Renaissance both painters and public embraced geometric perspective at a time when merchants and bankers increasingly And indeed, inside theWhat show, “Is this becomes a century persistent ThisBritish mustartist be—to borrow the(1922–2011) term fromunwitart hispracticed arithmeticonce and calculations. we might havereal?” in the mid-twentieth calledquestion. the “Pop eye,” Richard Hamilton torian Michael Baxandall—our “period eye.” Baxandall first introduced term in 1972 characterize impact cultural tingly pinpointed in 1956 as something that made “today’s homes so different, so appealing.” Thethis current sexiness of all to things post-internet the chronicles the of advent of another shift,on based the habit mediating one’s presence, identity, experiences, andpictures.(2) attention deficits. fact, thisfor tendency is no longer the exclusive privilege factors ouronways of of processing visual data and understanding HeInargued, instance, that during the Renaisof artistic derives, like the Bolex diaries of New York-based filmmaker Jonas Mekas, to name but one significant example. Artists like Baga are finding new ways of sance both painters and public embraced geometric perspective at a time when merchants and bankers increasingly practiced solving the old problem of how to engage and include the viewer within the space of representation. arithmetic and calculations. What we might have in the mid-twentieth century called the “Pop eye,” British artist Richard “Free Internet,” (1922–2011) a constellation of unwittingly over twenty works (including in 2D1956 and 3Das video projections, sculptures, and tapestries), plays theThe Hamilton pinpointed something that made paintings, “today’sinstallations, homes socollages, different, so appealing.” immersion It includes generous of hi-tech devices—which Baga has in passing compared to “one of those update alertsof onmediating your PC”—asone’s well aspresloads currentcard. sexiness of aall thingsamount post-internet chronicles the advent of another shift, based on the habit of objects made from paper, ceramics, papier mâché, and foam. Slick projectors join forces with flashlights with failing batteries, so that the show gives the impresidentity, InJust fact, tendency is nomixed-media longer theapproach exclusive privilege offirst artistic sionence, of having set footexperiences, in two different and time attention frames, pastdeficits. and present. likethis we all do. This fluid, brought Baga (who cut herderives, teeth in like thestudying Bolexatdiaries of New filmmaker Jonas Mekas, to name one significant example. Artists Baga are New York, Cooper Union andYork-based Bard College, and then opening her first solo show in 2012but at the Whitney Museum of American Art) tolike the forefront of exhibitions last year’s Lyon Biennale or last fall’s “Speculations onengage Anonymous at thewithin Fridericianum in Kassel. findingsuch newas ways of solving the old problem of how to andMaterials” includeexhibition the viewer the space of representation. Yet, there’s nothing less anonymous than Baga’s heaps of “materials”: the images and objects she employs are often self-made in collaboration with her family and “Free a constellation works (including 3D (here, videoalso projections, sculptures, paintings, installafriends; theInternet,” artist also regularly performs in of herover workstwenty in multiple, coexisting versions2D and and personae with moustaches and beards). The first room opens with a group of sculptures on plinths and cast with colored, theatrical lightning—including Ear, One Girl,Frequent (all devices—which works 2014). CarbonBaga 14, a geotions, collages, andsettapestries), plays the immersion card. It includes a generous amount of Flyer hi-tech has in metrical cluster of painted toothpicks, references the scientific method for calculating time and life spans by means of progressive decay. “SO, if you had a salami passing compared to “one of those update alerts on your PC”—as well as loads of objects made from paper, ceramics, papier that had 10% carbon-14 compared to a living sample, then that fossil would be T equals…line…oh, god,” says the voiceover in Baby, a large 3D video projection in mâché,room, and complete foam. Slick projectors joininforces with with an adjacent with striped deck chairs which you canflashlights sit down, relax, andfailing enjoy. batteries, so that the show gives the impression of having set foot in two different time frames, past and present. Just like we all do. This fluid, mixed-media approach brought Baga builds a webfirst of cross-references in perception, repetition, and difference: in the sculpture Pizza POV, of salami pinned to ashow wall Baga (who cut her teethand in exercises New York, studying at Cooper Union and Bard College, and real thenslices opening herarefirst solo above a carpet topped with ceramic objects; inSalami Display, 3D digital versions of salami are projected onto painted foam like spots; and in Salami Diamond, the in are 2012 at theasWhitney Museum of American Art)right to outside the forefront lastwhere year’s Lyon Biennale last fall’s slices projected big as planets in a darkened room. In Sand my door, of the exhibitions artist brings ussuch to her as studio, she’s painting while herordog sniffs “Speculations on Anonymous Materials” exhibition at the Fridericianum in Kassel. around and tries to devour every image (3D and otherwise) in sight. Time flies, as the “love clock” on Baby’s wall reminds us, and scenes shot in London, New York, Florida, and in a cave from one of Baga’s recent professional stays in Puerto Rico flash by (amongst the most recognizable characters in the video are naked members of the Vienna-based collective gelitin). Yet, there’s nothing less anonymous than Baga’s heaps of “materials”: the images and objects she employs are often self-made with her Baga family and the artist alsoherregularly performs in her works in multiple, coexisting On in thecollaboration opposite side of the gallery, turns the friends; imposing main room into own version of a dark cave. There are wires and projectors, as well as versions a number of manipulated objects (here, across aalso serieswith of works—including Mouth, a room-size rocking chairs-cum-stereo system; Guano, multi-piece and personae moustaches and beards). Theinstallation first roomwith opens with a group of sculptures setaon plinths sculpture and cast with flashlights directed at small mirrors that light up into temporary moons; and the 3D videoFlyer installation with Carbon recorded party repeating atcluster short with colored, theatrical lightning—including Ear, One Girl, Frequent (all Twin’s worksParty 2014). 14, ascenes geometrical intervals like in a sports instant replay. Baga toys with Plato’s allegory of the cave, whose prisoners can not only see shadows, but also imagine grasping the objects painted toothpicks, scientific method forVery calculating time andfor life bydescribes means of decay. “SO, andof forms that cast them, so thatreferences appearancesthe might be mistaken for reality. appropriate, I guess, an spans artist who her progressive practice as a way to “guide if you had a compositions salami thatabout had the 10% compared a living sample, then that fossil would be T equals…line…oh, god,” phenomenological actscarbon-14 of looking and recognizing,toand the gap in between.”(3) says the voiceover in Baby, a large 3D video projection in an adjacent room, complete with striped deck chairs in which you can sit down, relax, and enjoy. 1) Nam June Paik, “Danger Musik for Dick Higgins,” in Notations, ed. John Cage (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), not paginated [207]. 2) As Baxandall writes, “A picture is sensitive to the kinds of interpretive skill—patterns, categories, inferences, analogies—the mind brings to it.” See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 34. 3) Trisha Baga, “About”: http://bagalab.biz/work/About.html Bülow Wichelhaus GbRcurator / Genthiner 36She / 10785 Berlin / Germany 30 261 03283 / [email protected] Barbara Casavecchia is a freelance writer and based Strasse in Milan. is a contributing editor to/ +49 frieze. 1/2 SOCIÉTÉ Baga builds a web of cross-references and exercises in perception, repetition, and difference: in the sculpture Pizza POV, real slices of salami are pinned to a wall above a carpet topped with ceramic objects; in Salami Display, 3D digital versions of salami are projected onto painted foam like spots; and in Salami Diamond, the slices are projected as big as planets in a darkened room. In Sand right outside my door, the artist brings us to her studio, where she’s painting while her dog sniffs around and tries to devour every image (3D and otherwise) in sight. Time flies, as the “love clock” on Baby’s wall reminds us, and scenes shot in London, New York, Florida, and in a cave from one of Baga’s recent professional stays in Puerto Rico flash by (amongst the most recognizable characters in the video are naked members of the Vienna-based collective gelitin). On the opposite side of the gallery, Baga turns the imposing main room into her own version of a dark cave. There are wires and projectors, as well as a number of manipulated objects across a series of works—including Mouth, a room-size installation with rocking chairs-cum-stereo system; Guano, a multi-piece sculpture with flashlights directed at small mirrors that light up into temporary moons; and the 3D video installation Twin’s Party with recorded party scenes repeating at short intervals like in a sports instant replay. Baga toys with Plato’s allegory of the cave, whose prisoners can not only see shadows, but also imagine grasping the objects and forms that cast them, so that appearances might be mistaken for reality. Very appropriate, I guess, for an artist who describes her practice as a way to “guide phenomenological compositions about the acts of looking and recognizing, and the gap in between.”(3) 1) Nam June Paik, “Danger Musik for Dick Higgins,” in Notations, ed. John Cage (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), not paginated [207]. 2) As Baxandall writes, “A picture is sensitive to the kinds of interpretive skill—patterns, categories, inferences, analogies— the mind brings to it.” See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 34. 3) Trisha Baga, “About”: http://bagalab.biz/work/About.html. Babara Casaveccia Originally published in Art Agenda, July 2014 2/2 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] Time Out London SOCIÉTÉ Women artists on the cutting edge Today´s art is all about sampling, splicing and generally tinkering with genres, and women are leading the way. We take a look at the artists who define the new breed Trisha Baga The backstory Born 1985 in Venice, Florida; lives in New York. Baga´s star has been rising of late with a solo show last year at New York´s Whitney Museum of American Art. Museums can´t get enough of her immersive videos ans istallations that blend performance with digital technology. The show Scattering objects from everyday life - beer cans, trainers, paint pots, sacks of rice - among 3D projections, Baga fills the former Methodist church with an ordered mess that echoes the contens of her cyberconnected existence. A highlight is “Madonna y El Nino”, which co-opts footage of Madonna to talk about changing technological currents in the pop lanscape. The verdict A bit loke a bad internet hangover, Baga´s perpetual ‘work in progress’ aesthetic rolls the night before into the day after. Think: Tracey Emin´s ‘My Bed’ for the Facebook generation Martin Coomer and Freire Barnes Originally published in Time Out London, March 2014 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ Frieze Trisha Baga Société Berlin Trisha Baga, An Inconvenient Trash, 2013, Ausstellungsansich, 3D Videoinstallation und unterschiedliche Materialien Most of us have come to expect some variety of slick spectacle upon receiving a pair of 3D glasses. But in Trisha Baga’s first solo exhibition at Société, the technology is mobilized towards different ends – colliding with trash, craft, and the slower pace of conceptual performance. Baga’s 3D video installations of various sizes fill all four rooms of the gallery. Most of the videos are projected onto minimally-painted and collaged Styrofoam boards leaning against walls and surrounded by objects that would usually be discarded or disguised: projectors, DVD players and speakers lie strewn across the floor, their cables left visible and winding. An array of pizza boxes, cigarette packs, beer bottles, and crumpled aluminium scraps have been left discarded around the gallery from the installation process. As in prior exhibitions, Baga purposefully obstructs parts of each projection with these seemingly scattered objects, which then become actors in the work, adding surfaces for projection while casting static shadows upon the movement of the video. Coupled with the mediation of 3D glasses, this physical layering lends her compositions a pleasurable reference to the experience of watching videos on one’s desktop with several tabs open. Notions of waste, productivity and ecological disaster play out in Baga’s films themselves. In An Inconvenient Trash (all works 2013) she appropriates clips from the beginning of the well-known documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006) – former US Vice President Al Gore’s attempt to disseminate the perils of global warming – and alters them, often undoing the original synched sound and animating the screen with Microsoft Paint-like computer graphics. Unlike in most of her other works, we don’t see Baga’s hands, head, or body in the video. Instead, most of the animation appears to be made with screen capture which the artist performs through digital gestures like pointing and drawing with a mouse. Baga’s additions both play with and pollute the original film – the documentary becomes just another digital artifact, the ironic result of Gore’s environmentalism filtered through the context of gallery-based garbage. In Parrotfish the artist enacts the grand gesture of spray-painting a map of the US over a large mound of melting snow in a backyard rubbish dump. Her legs wrapped in bin bags and slowed by the snow and the litter, Baga’s movements are awkward but deliberate. She often points to a section of snow, as if we the viewers might recognize a particular state, but it is rarely possible due to the camera’s angle. Just before the loop resets, Cher’s 1989 hit If I Could Turn Back Time comes on, and the camera zooms in sentimentally on the shadow of the artist’s hand waving over spray-painted black arrows – probably stand-ins for some great American mountainscape. This slow, hilariously futile, ironically patriotic land art piece is preserved in a video that is too long for most viewers to watch in its entirety: the opposite of a Hollywood IMAX. In the less epic The Bather, bits of tissue paper drift down onto the surface of bath water. A motif throughout several of the projections, the colourful pieces fall randomly, like in Jean (Hans) Arp’s Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance) (1916–7), but here we see Baga’s process – a kind of craft performance through play – rather than the finished Arp piece. The colours slowly bleed out of the tissue paper: a red piece streams like a jellyfish, a pink one twirls mirroring a swatch of pale pink paint on the Styrofoam below. The artist’s finger comes into the frame and pokes the water, sending ripples around the bath. I think about the first time I saw an IMAX film, and grabbed at the projection as sharks zoomed towards me. But here the technology synthesizes everything into a flat, nearly continuous, photo-realistic surface and Baga’s technique cleverly mocks itself: I don’t need to poke the video, but must remove the glasses to see the Styrofoam. Sara Stern Originally published in Frieze d/e n.10, June-August 2013 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] ART PARASITES SOCIÉTÉ Talk Trashy To Me Art star Trisha Baga brings her unique blend of video and installation to Berlin—and baby, trashy never looked so good! Join us on our adventure to the west side of Berlin! Once, at a party in Prague, I was introduced to a New York-based artist as a fellow New Yorker. He asked me “who I knew” before learning my name, and as I stood in stunned silence he wandered away. Sometimes the cool kids really piss me off. And, frankly, I’ve never really understood the contemporary art cognoscenti’s relentless return to the “trash-tallation.” Since Paul Thek perfected it in the seventies, I’m forced to ask: seriously—is there anything interesting about a room full of all the crap you’ve collected, groceries you’ve purchased, random-ass shit from your studio, etc. etc., other than the too-cool-for-school factor? Well, as it turns out, there just may be. At Société, Trisha Baga has put a new spin on trash, and as “cool” as it is, I kinda sorta really love it. And, it certainly seems as though I’m not the only one—Baga has shown at MOMA PS1, The Whitney, Greene Naftali; and now, steps away from the women of the night (and mid-afternoon), she has touched down at Société. According to her website, Trisha “engages the formal languages and concerns of sculpture, painting, cinema, music, photography, comedy and fiction”...and, after visiting “Florida” it’s clear that she is also familiar with the work of Al Gore and the utter awesomeness of Animal House. After all, Baga’s installation at Société is perhaps the perfect blend of high and low, trash and treasure, Doritos and Derrida. Baga’s notorious blend of video and installation recalls, in this instance, not only the sad-but-true horror of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but also the poignant and utterly perilous search for meaning and momentum in these modern times. Quite honestly, Baga’s work reminds me of Berlin—hooked on cheap beer and disposable lighters yet yearning for something a little brighter, a litter better; and yes, little more sustainable. And so, I say bring your own beach blanket, brave the bad neighborhood, and settle down with a little slice of modern life at Société. It doesn’t matter who you know, like the sunshine state itself, there’s a little something here for everyone. Hannah Nelson-Teutsch Originally published in Berlin Art Parasites, May 2013 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] DAZED SOCIÉTÉ Hung & Drawn: art news New shows from Berlin´s Alicja Kwade, legend Martin Kippenberger and 3D artist Trisha Baga Exhibition of the week: Trisha Baga at Societe Berlin Greeted with a table of 3D glasses expectation is high, and Baga doesn’t disappoint. Stereoscopic projections sit behind, or on, artist detritus on the floor – beers, paint tins, plastic sheeting – and several cardboard structures. Baga’s exhibition is immersive, enthralling and considered. Vignettes including floating 3D colours overlaid over a crude painting of feet at the end of a bathtub, or a little dog grappling with a blow up foot spa, compliment the larger, longer videos. One particularly intricate composition with equally complex soundtrack touches on graphic software and Carl Sagan amongst other influences and provides the cornerstone in a show that prompts questions of surface, depth, materiality painting, and pop media/tech culture. Susanna Davies-Crook Originally published in Dazed Digital, May 2013 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ Texte zur Kunst Attitude becomes dorm Mathieu Malouf on Trisha Baga at Greene Naftali, New York Safely nested on the eighth floor of a Chelsea building, Greene Naftali was spared the flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy that destroyed a lot of art in the neighborhood this past fall. Still, some of the trauma found its way back to the surface upon entering Trisha Baga’s recent exhibition at the gallery. The projected image of a palm tree on the back wall and a trail of derelict objects (as well as, occasionally, an abstract painting) sprawled across the floor vaguely recalled scenes of destruction on Long Island beaches – with added tropical notes – as well as photos of Chelsea gallerists and their assistants putting wet art on the curb to dry. Baga has been known to feature prominently in her videos and perform amidst her “glamorized messes”, so the alienating atmosphere at Greene Naftali – reinforced by the dim lighting required to view the 3D works – marked somewhat of a departure. Still, the lack of human warmth was somewhat compensated for by the visibly hand-wrought quality of the decoration, the generally festive color palette, and a diffuse but still palpable sense of slapstick theatricality. One finds these qualities in “The Story of Painting” (2012), a 3D slideshow overlaid with quirky digital doodles and complemented with audio narration by an amateur art historian on the subject of Impressionist painting – a stand-in for something like serious culture. “Framed” by the shadows of small objects placed on the ground between the projector and the wall (a can of soda, a canvas employed as a sculptural prop), the piece both filters a canonical art historical reference through a populist lens, and may hint distantly at the work of Baga’s former professor and fellow Greene Naftali artist Rachel Harrison. Yet the physical environment of the art-school dorm offers a more potent point of origin for this attitude: A space of semi-precarious existence sometimes used to study, sometimes just to throw parties. The impression is reinforced by the silent presence in the dark gallery of silhouettes wearing headphones as they stare at flickering screens, painted beer bottles on the ground, and a white canvas approximating both the physical volume of a pizza box and the colorful palette of a pie with all the toppings. Trisha Baga, “The Biggest Circle”, Greene Naftali, New York, 2012/13, exhibition view, Photo: Jason Mandella Until the provided pairs of electronic 3D glasses and headphones could be made out in the dark and properly activated, “Hercules” (2012), a video projected directly on the wall, appeared scrambled and out of focus, its content not quite discernible yet not necessarily readable as an abstraction either. With the equipment turned on, the body entered a sort of hypnoid trance, and any initial recalcitrance soon gave way to a relaxed state, the eye free to roam across the stuff protruding from the luminescent rectangle on the wall. As is the case with many of the videos in the exhibition, there is a liberal use of digital compositing effects, transitions, and superimpositions, somewhat facilitating the absorption of disparate video clips and sound bites. On the screen, a rapid succession of soundtracks and sequences combine appropriated and homemade material – a computer-generated fire, parties, animals, fireworks, a slowed sequence of an athlete jumping. The film also offers reflexive moments of respite, notably one in which we see the artist at work in her studio, accompanied by a dog. The most effective of these moments may be the sequence in which a cow is seen peacefully grazing in the grass in enhanced 3D. Contemplating this high-tech rendition of masticating, domesticated livestock, we become aware of our own sensory-deprived body sitting in a gallery in passive enjoyment. Commenting on her work in a short interview published in Mousse, [1] Baga consistently opposes traditionally feminine attributes of softness and fluidity to masculine clichés of hardness and rigidity. Questioned by Jenny Jaskey about the “hyperBrechtian” quality of the breaks in her video edits, the artist proposes the term “bleeding” as an alternative to “breaking”. 1/2 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ Later, commenting on her move away from linear narratives, she alludes to “an attempt to curve an abstraction of the arc”, concluding that a “straight line is often the least efficient way to get anywhere”. The medusan allegory culminates when, opposing her homemade spin on 3D to Hollywood’s oppressive, industrial use of it, Baga refers to the “juices of looking” that she tries to preserve by keeping her work “moist”. For many artists of the same generation who engage with cutting-edge audio-visual technologies with simultaneous proficiency and playfulness, [2] the act of looking is indeed often associated with juices and liquid environments. [3] Its title itself evoking water in a vapor state as well as an impending downpour, “Cloud Atlas” (2012) is full of mercurial seductiveness. A single-channel video projection that could elsewhere fit a normal screen is diffracted here by a small clay plate encrusted with shards of a mirror – an artisanal variation on the artist’s signature disco ball (found in “Madonna y el Nino” as well as “Flatlands”, both 2011, not included in this exhibition). The slowly modulating hues and shifts in luminosity produced by the projection’s footage of fireworks approximated the hypnotic flow of a lava lamp and a computer screensaver. Ambient and decorative, it still retained something vaguely melancholic. And this is perhaps what this exhibition as a whole – more so than its individual parts – achieves most eloquently: Sublimating the streams of trash generated by daily existence into a decor impregnated with personal pathos. If a similar pathos could be the product of, for example, hours working overtime in front of a computer with frequent intervals procrastinating on YouTube, Baga’s work offers a perhaps more genuinely personal and handcrafted entry point for the experience. What could have easily turned into a lugubrious accumulation of theatrical failures actually becomes a conduit for the transmission of intense feeling. Mathieu Malouf Originally published in Texte zur Kunst n.89, March 2013 NOTES 1 Jenny Jaskey, “Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2 at the Whitney Museum, New York”, December 5, 2012. Online at: http://moussemagazine. it/trisha-baga-whitney/. 2 Simon Denny’s TV aquariums would be but one example; other artists treating the formal motif using other media include Pamela Rosenkranz, Yngve Holen, Josh Kline, and Oliver Laric. 3 At odds with Baga’s protean mode of circulation, “Dickface” is an MS font created by Bill Hayden and Nicolás Guagnini in which letters are composed of small erect penises that can only be seen when “hard” (letters do not appear unless caps lock is on). Rather than “flood” its venues, it penetrates them. 2/2 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] FRIEZE SOCIÉTÉ Paraphantoms, Temporary Gallery Trisha Baga, Flatlands 3D, 2010, 3D video installation ‘Please remove your glasses.’ This polite directive suddenly appeared in the guise of a subtitle in Trisha Baga’s video installation Flatlands 3D (2010). Viewers – sporting 3D glasses issued in the gallery’s foyer – had just been drawn into the depths of the film to navigate rain-wet streets and meadows. Now, freed from the spectacles, their eyes were drawn to a disco ball placed to beside the screen and catching some of the projector’s light. From the ball’s mirrored surface, the light was scattered into the room, the minute reflections surrounding the viewer in the same way as the 3D raindrops seen on the camera lens in the film. The simulated depth of the filmed image became the real depthof the room. Here, visual perception – rather than being subjected to a linear sequence of frames – was about embedding the gazein a physical space. In this way, Baga’s work reflects a key aim of the group show Paraphantoms: to sketch out a pictorial space that has already integrated its own breaks, whether in terms of content, materiality or structure. A pictorial space, then, that might be said to be troubled by itself. Curator Regina Barunke – who chose works by Ed Atkins, Amy Granat, Corin Sworn and Charlotte Prodger, Joseph Zehrer and Baga – created an exhibition that attempted to pin down this phantom quality in both the photographic and moving image and found this quality above all in the syntheses of media-generated images and in the spectator’s experience of the space directly surrounding their bodies. The central point of reference was supplied by Ed Atkins’s films Death Mask II: The Scent (2010) and Death Mask III: The Scent (2011). Related to the film essay form, their footage oscillates between the qualities of moving images and photographic stills. Shots of the sea, people from behind or a mountain (a recurring motif in Death Mask III) appear in various nuances of lighting. The colour scale of the images varies between garish contrasts and black and white while showing the full range of what can be done with image processing software, through to the almost total disappearance of the picture. The eye is repeatedly torn from contemplating any particular scene, as screens of colour briefly flash up on the screen. In Joseph Zehrer’s photographic installation TV-Ecken in Junggesellenwohnungen (TV corners in bachelor pads, 1997), the image sequencing is analogue. Presented in a corner of the gallery’s foyer, the work consists of wall-mounted photographs of television sets in apartments. In the foyer in front of each photograph, Zehrer placed a free-standing cardboard display which each bore a coloured rectangle corresponding to the screen ofthe TV set in question. Within the show as a whole, Zehrer’s work provided a sense ofrespite by contrasting the flickering ecstatic images seen in the other video works witha moment of reflection. It even seemed as if fragments of images in other worlds were appearing as phantoms projected onto Zehrer’s ‘colour TVs’. On various levels, Paraphantoms aimed to encourage people to remove their (imaginary) glasses, as in Baga’s Flatlands. To achieve this, the show deployed the circular movement of visual repetitions and loops,the discovery of a crack in the image on second or third viewing. Although the exhibition sometimes lost itself in identifying formal analogies, as a whole it proposed a convincing model for the analysis and treatment of today’s visual worlds which are increasingly characterized by a permanent immersion in (hyper)real images. Christina Irrgang Originally published in Frieze d/e NO.8, February-March 2013 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] The New York Times SOCIÉTÉ Vying for Fluency in Many Languages Trisha Baga at the Whitney, Greene Naftali and MoMA PS1 The Biggest Circle, at Greene Naftali, has the most expansive view of Trisha Baga‘s work, like „Bag‘s Circle, 2012,“ above, a video installation with an array of nondescript objects. Trisha Baga must feel as if she had died and gone to heaven. Her poetically frowzy installations of video projections, paintings, sculptures and scattered objects can be seen now in two New York museums — in a lobby gallery solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in “New Pictures of Common Objects,” a group show at MoMA PS 1 — and she has a sprawling exhibition at Greene Naftali in Chelsea, a gallery admired by the art world cognoscenti. A New York resident, she also had solo shows in London and Munich in 2012. And she is only 27. Sometimes a precocious youngster brings to the table intriguing news of her own burgeoning generation. If Ms. Baga typifies her 20-something cohort, then a description of what she does from her Web site is noteworthy. It says that she “engages the formal languages and concerns of sculpture, painting, cinema, music, photography, comedy and fiction” to direct attention to “the acts of looking and recognizing, and the gap in between.” To be an artist of Ms. Baga’s sort is not to be good at anything in particular, but to be a porous intelligence open to the world and to all possible ways of mirroring it. The Greene Naftali show, appropriately titled “The Biggest Circle,” provides the most expansive view of her enterprise. For “The Story of Painting,” one of three installations, you don 3-D glasses and headphones, through which you hear the popular art historian Sister Wendy lecturing on canonical painters from Titian to Degas with breathless wonder. On the floor is an array of nondescript objects, including bottles and rough abstract sculptures made of painted foam blocks; a generic, brushy abstract painting hangs on the wall. Projected onto the wall over it are changing compositions of flat, colorful abstract shapes and a simple mask with eye holes and an oval mouth. Thanks to 3-D technology, these elements appear uncannily dimensional. Watching them with Sister Wendy’s fulsome discourse ringing in your ears makes for a comical collision of high and low. “Hercules,” a meditation on hero worship, mixes found YouTube videos and recordings made by Ms. Baga. There are scenes from a Madonna concert and the London Olympics; penguins on a waterside rock; a teenage boy playing with sparklers, which, seen in 3-D, seem to shoot sparks into real space; and home movies of Ms. Baga and friends on a boating and picnicking excursion. The exhibition’s most emblematic work is “Bag’s Circle,” which centers on a floor-to-ceiling projection of the circular mouth of a much-used but empty paper bag that is spinning around and around. The revolving, open sack suggests an ethos of inclusiveness that calls to mind artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Pipilotti Rist.“Plymouth Rock 2,” Ms. Baga’s installation at the Whitney, is similar to her works at Greene Naftali in the apparent randomness of its video projection and distribution of banal objects and sculptures on the floor, some of which cast shadows on the wall. Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] 1/2 SOCIÉTÉ There is also a certain narrative dimension. Images of heaving ocean swells shot from a swimmer’s point of view, and of a man with a metal detector searching for treasure on a beach, suggest a kind of quest, a search for a Holy Grail — which turns out to be Plymouth Rock, the boulder on which, legend has it, the Pilgrims first alighted in the New World. An informative brochure essay by Elisabeth Sherman, a Whitney curatorial assistant who organized the show, quotes Ms. Baga’s description of that hallowed stone’s history. It is “the saddest story of an object, where it becomes a symbol, and is moved from place to place through overly elaborate processes, broken in half and brought back together, chipped away, all of this to accommodate various presentation modes ... Right now, they’ve built a gazebo around it to protect it from the rain. A rock protected from the rain. It’s my favorite sculpture story.” It is a pathetic Grail, this sad rock, which makes it all the more poignant to contemplate. It is, perhaps, a metaphor for our beleaguered spiritual condition. In “Hard Rock,” Ms. Baga’s installation of objects and a video projection at PS 1, a 3-D image of a white cube resembling a plastic-foam cooler appears intermittently, the object seeming to hover and turn mysteriously in midair. It is another sort of Grail, one that contains a secret, an unknown something that may or may not be knowable, perhaps the ultimate key to existence. Or maybe it is just an empty container. Who knows? What matters to Ms. Baga is the trip, not the final destination. Originally published in The New York Times, December 2012 2/2 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] Mousse Magazine SOCIÉTÉ Trisha Baga “Plymouth Rock 2” at the Whitney Museum, New York Trisha Baga interviewed by Jenny Jaskey on the occasion of “Plymouth Rock 2”, Baga’s first US solo show. Jenny Jaskey: Your work currently on view at the Whitney Museum, Plymouth Rock 2, presents a fractured narrative. It seems to suggest, to borrow Adorno’s aphorism, that “the whole is untrue”. I’m wondering if you could speak a bit more about your interest in the fragment and in returning to an icon of past without looking for an origin. Trisha Baga: Now that you’ve got me thinking about the word origin (even though I’ve been listening to that song “Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch over and over again for the past four months), I think the origin you are referring to, I think to me, that is the present – the here, now experience. Which is such a dumb and impossibly slippery thing, but we are all subject to grasping at it, each from our singular bodies. What we experience is only a fragment of what we are aware of and vice-versa, and what I am interested in is the stuff that fills the gaps. Desire is a part of it, and I am realizing that the 3D video piece I just showed you (the long one with fireworks and karaoke starships) is about, well, this is what I wrote in my notebook earlier today: the desire to exceed the body, and how that led to sports, the industrial revolution, 3DTV, and Madonna. JJ: Speaking of Madonna, there are a number of subjects that recur in your videos. She is one, but I’m also thinking of “natural” phenomena like water, fire, and light. I use scare quotes around “natural” here, because I’m not sure that the nature/culture divide holds up in this case. What is the appeal of these elements for you? TB: Biologically, these are the elements of culture (like a bacteria culture/growth/life) – the elements of culture and perception. All living things contain water, and light is the only thing we can see. You could say that fire is the body version of light. These are actually super-traditional references. “The sea” and “the sun” are the large bodies of these elements and they can constantly be located as the object of metaphors, from contemporary pop songs to ancient storytelling. I think of them as moody constants that inform and are informed by the things they surround and contain, as well as things that contain them. The words we use to describe the weather are often the same words we use to describe emotions. JJ: I once heard you say in passing that you were more interested in reality than fiction, and I’m wondering how this might square with your obsession with larger-than-life figures like Madonna or the Olympics, typically regarded in terms of how they occupy mediatized space. TB: I’ve been thinking of the show at Greene Naftali, “The Biggest Circle”, as an early stage of understanding “epic”, but in broad layers instead of progressive steps.* The Olympics is a large subject (the history of the world’s culture) that has been condensed by representation. In contrast, Madonna or Plymouth Rock are both body-sized subjects that have been expanded by representation. There is something about using my own body and blunt experience as a form of mediation or filter that enables sympathy for these bodies. You could say it makes them body-sized again. Stem cell research. * I have issues with progress – the concept of it, the stretch towards it, the motivations behind it, and its psychological implications, especially in regard to America and American history and ideals. It seems like an insatiable hunger, or an excuse to take things away from other people. I think it is also related to how I’ve been stepping away from narrative video, or at least making an attempt to curve an abstraction of the arc, back into a circle. A straight line is often the least efficient way to get anywhere. JJ: A number of writers have remarked on how your work is sort of hyper-Brechtian – layer upon layer of “breaks”, so to speak: the direct address of the film, the interruption of physical objects on top of filmed objects, the play of “real” shadows against projected ones. While Brecht was interested in laying bare the mechanisms of theater, I’m wondering if you think that is even possible – is there any sort of outside to which we can return? TB: We’re over the whole fourth wall thing, right? How many times can people look at us and go “voilà!” and have that be exciting? I hope my work bleeds rather than breaks. I know that my practice does – between art and life and making and gathering. Maybe that answers your question about the outside. But ultimately I think it depends on who is looking at the work and what condition their eyes are in at the moment. JJ: Your work for “The Biggest Circle” at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York has a strong relationship to painting, and I’m wondering if you could say a bit more about this aspect of the work. TB: I don’t know how to talk about painting, but when I started working with 3D video, it felt like I was painting. I was making curiosity-driven decisions about light and color and composition, and it was very liberating. 1/2 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ It was about understanding what “stripeness” is and how that is different from “redness” and “underness” and letting those THINGS set off strings of associations without demanding that these qualities align into modes of linearity (which would bring them outside of their own terms). JJ: In other words, an interest in uncovering the hidden ecologies of the everyday materials around us. For example, asking not just what a sequined shirt signifies, but wondering about its capacities for diffusing light. TB: The object is not to re-historicize, but to adjust the dials on attention, perception, and affect in order to arrive at a THING’s natural frequency. For example, looking at an image of a tennis ball but knowing the THING you are looking at is hairiness and comedy. Wanting to pull qualities an arm’s distance away from their names, or “the people’s understanding”. JJ: It strikes me that this way of looking happens much more slowly – that it requires a different pace. TB: I want to create a greater space of looking. The best thing about consumer-grade 3D technology is that the viewers have their own choices to make about what they look at within the frame, allowing the images to move and change much more slowly. It stands in contrast to Hollywood’s typical way of directing focus and eye movement, which I find so oppressive and wasteful. To borrow an analogy from cooking, I want to spend more time in the oven without drying out the juices of looking. Jenny Jaskey Originally published in Mousse Magazine, December 2012 2/2 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] Artforum SOCIÉTÉ “Hasta Mañana” Trisha Baga, Peacock, 2011, video installation with mixed media, 14 minutes. From “Hasta Mañana.” “Hasta Mañana,” ABBA’s 1974 Swedish hit, barely cracked the charts overseas. But the sappy tune’s tale of a summer fling that never fully blossomed—and the attendant pain of losing, pleasure of forgetting, and indifference one needs to move on— remains universal. Though the organizers of “Hasta Mañana,” a group show at Greene Naftali, may not have had this song in mind, the doleful dirge is nonetheless a fitting anthem for the contemplative yet spirited exhibition. Employing current modes of art production and an up-to-the-moment perspective, the five artists on view use the past to inspire soulful, empathic takes on digital technologies. A sense of handcraftedness upends technophilic idioms, revealing a sensitivity to what once was. Ken Okiishi, not one to shy away from anachronistic practices, communes with one of his idols in his photographic series David Wojnarowicz in New York, 1999–2001. Taken on a cheap digital camera, each pixelated image depicts Okiishi holding a cutout of Wojnarowicz’s solemn visage in front of a quotidian millennial backdrop: a sterile Times Square subway entrance, Okiishi’s college bedroom, or the imposing health club that replaced Wojnarowicz’s former stomping grounds on the Chelsea piers. (The project rehashes Wojnarowicz’s iconic “Rimbaud in New York” series [1978–79], for which the artist posed in a mask fashioned after the face of that famous poet.) The sentimental works offer Okiishi’s youthful laments for a faded New York that has only grown more distant. But what does the past have to say to the present? “Cheer up,” according to Ei Arakawa, whose United Brothers, a collaborative group that includes himself, Das Institut, and his brother, Tomoo Arakawa, contributes BLACKY Blocked Radiants Sunbathed, 2011. The slideshow documents the artist’s return to his brother’s tanning salon, Blacky, in the Fukushima region of Japan in the wake of the nearby nuclear crisis. Lying inside hulking tanning beds, Blacky’s tangerine-tinted regulars pose alongside the artist’s adolescent paintings as images of soothing abstractions by Das Institut are projected onto their bodies. Arakawa’s therapeutic performance protests the nihilism induced by global catastrophe with familial retrospection and an ample dose of humor. The exhibition delves into the past of our computer-mediated present via methods that once drew attention to themselves, but for many artists today are almost second nature. Offerings by Scott Lyall and Helen Marten explore the ephemeral side of technology with the digital machination du jour: ink-jet-printed wall adhesives (recently adopted for youthful effect by established figures, such as Cindy Sherman and Louise Lawler). 1/2 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ Marten’s vector drawing Some Civic Shades (Highball Hi Rise), 2011, mingles retro Mac icons with an assortment of clipart graphics, ranging from an image of the Parthenon to a cartoon of a bread baker. Meanwhile, Lyall contributes large, pale, nearly monochrome gradient stickers that feel like shy cousins of Cory Arcangel’s plucky Photoshop abstractions. Two recent videos by the clever, young, brassy video artist Trisha Baga carry the exhibition. Peacock, 2011, weaves a fantastical narrative of immigration and discovery, juxtaposing footage of young people wielding machetes in the artist’s native Florida, the sorrowful audiobook introduction of The Joy Luck Club, and stills of Baga frolicking around New York’s Liberty Island. Like Alex Bag before her, Baga performs on-screen, though the character she’s portraying may be none other than herself, whether she’s smiling and waving stupidly in disguise or distorting Big Spender with her slouching voice. Baga’s videos juggle equal measures of charming playfulness (exemplified by a smattering of googly eyes popping on-screen and off within seconds), and earnestness so pervasive it’s disarming. Though pop-cultural pastiche is nothing new, Baga’s unprepossessingly handsome aesthetic and homespun candor imbue her work with an enduring honesty that rises above the din of the ADHDaddled art of today. This is how one updates the present with the past. Beau Rutland Originally published in Artforum International, October 2012 2/2 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ Time Out London Trisha Baga: Rock Installation view of Trisha Baga, `Rock`at Vilma Gold Gallery - Courtesy Vilma Gold London Trisha Baga´s elastic assemblies of gauzy video projections and floor-based tumbles of scattered objects feel both old and new. The tone is one of aftermath, of great ideal on the slide: Baga´s camera records the beach at sunset, then splinters into randomness - penguins at the zoo, dancers, bursts of Middle Eastern script, passages of abstract geometry. This comes projected over three slouchy abstract paintings, while on the floor are a spraypainted boombox, a tripped-over plinth, tangles of cables. Don´t try to make sense of it; rather, give yourself up to an evocation of fraying and dissolution. (MH) Originally published in Time Out London, June 2012 Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany +49 30 816 18 962 / [email protected] Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ Monopol Trisha Baga – „World Peace“, Kunstverein München „Eine logische Konsequenz aus der gegenwärtigen Verbreitung der Massenmedien besteht darin, dass der eigentliche Wert kultureller Erfahrung einfach durch die flüchtige Befriedigung ersetzt wird, die Besitztum mit sich bringt. Insofern konnte ein universelles Konzept wie „World Peace“ („Weltfriede“) kürzlich als Kulisse für den Popstar Madonna fungieren – in Form einer gigantischen medialen Landschaft aus Monitoren, die um ihre Bühne herum angeordnet waren. Eine solche Hightech-Veranstaltung ist weit weg von den instabilen Landschaften aus einzelnen Projektoren, Wasserflaschen und reflektierenden Materialien, wie sie sich bei der in New York lebenden Video- und Performancekünstlerin Trisha Baga (geb. 1985 in Venice, Florida, USA) finden. Und doch hat Baga genau diese Formulierung, „World Peace“, als Titel ihrer ersten institutionellen Einzelausstellung im Kunstverein München gewählt. Dahinter verbirgt sich die Einsicht, dass für einen Imagewechsel und die Neudefinition einer bekannten Trope ein Beamer und eine Wasserflasche völlig ausreichend sind. Die Ausstellung „World Peace“ präsentiert fünf Videoinstallationen von Trisha Baga, die die Ausstellungsräume durch die Verwendung ungewöhnlicher Materialien in atmosphärische Landschaften aus Lichtreflexionen und Sound verwandeln. In ihrer Gesamtheit kennzeichnen sie die zwanglosen und in hohem Maße improvisierenden Vorgehensweisen, mit denen die Künstlerin die Muster hinter der heutigen Bildproduktion untersucht, die sich aus fast drei Jahrzehnten Videoclips, Dokumentationen, Konzerten und Interviews speist. Trisha Baga steht für eine junge Künstlergeneration, die den konsumorientierten Aspekt heutiger Bildproduktion als gegeben hinnimmt und einfach die unendliche Zahl an Bildquellen, die das Internet und andere populäre Medien bereitstellen, anzapft. Dennoch besteht die Zielsetzung der Künstlerin nicht darin, die zunehmende Standardisierung der Bildproduktion in den heutigen Medien offenzulegen. Ihr geht es vielmehr um das Thema Komplexität. Anschaulich wird dies, indem sie durch die Veränderung des Präsentationskontextes immer wieder neue Darstellungsebenen und Blickwinkel bei der Entwicklung einzelner Videoarbeiten hinzufügt. Ein bestimmtes Video kann dann als Lecture-Performance oder als Hintergrund für eine KaraokePerformance fungieren oder aber dazu eingesetzt werden, beliebige Objekte in einer Rauminstallation zu beleuchten. Diese formalen Adaptionen werden von der Künstlerin dokumentiert und fließen ihrerseits wieder in das entsprechende Video ein. Im Kunstverein München besetzt Baga den Raum, indem sie ihre Videoinstallation durch die Hinzufügung der visuellen Metaphern Licht, Reflexion und Wasser in eine illuminierte Landschaft verwandelt. So zeigt ein Video mit geradezu dokumentarischer Präzision, wie Regen gegen ein Fenster prasselt (Rain, Video, 2012). In der Videoinstallation Body of Evidence, ebenfalls von 2012, nimmt eine Wasserflasche das Zentrum der Bühne ein. Zwischen Projektor und projiziertem Bild platziert, verdeckt sie die Mitte der Projektion. Der Vordergrund verwandelt sich dadurch in den Hintergrund und umgekehrt, sodass das mediale Bild destabilisiert wird. Trisha Baga lebt und arbeitet in New York. Bisherige Ausstellungen ihrer Arbeiten fanden unter anderem statt im PS1, Artist’s Space, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Anthology Film Archives, Greene Naftali und Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York. Am 30. März 2012 präsentierte sie im Cornerhouse Manchester eine neue Performance mit dem Titel Pedestrian Mysticism (www.cornerhouse.org).“ Originally published in Monopol, Spring 2012 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ BLOUIN ARTINFO Trisha Baga : Rock Baga is a young artist working mainly in video and performance. In terms of technology, plot and resources however, her approach to making is inclusive, playful and highly improvisational, so that her practice begins to unfix such distinctions. Though precarious by its nature, this tack also thrives on the possibility that arises when everything around becomes potential material for narrative making. Throughout her work Baga’s interests lie with the “common things” that surround us, using these, enthusiastically, to guide phenomenological compositions about the act of looking and recognizing and the potentiality that might lie in the gap between. Her work could be described as foregrounding distraction as a methodology. The screen of her videos often becomes a surface in its own right. Rarely treated with preciousness, filmed footage becomes rather malleable as it is covered with objects and filmed again, subjected to screen effects, split, mirrored or flipped around to reveal a different surface, a different world, beneath. As such her approach to narrative might be compared to the logic of browsing online and hyperlinks, and is one that admits the space to drift, notice and find, with technological processes charting her course as she goes. Originally published in Blouin Artinfo, April 2012 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected] SOCIÉTÉ Fouth Wall Patricia Baga January 7-30, 2011 Rectangle with the Sound of Its Own Making, 2010 Video, 28 minutes Trisha Baga brings process art and arte povera to video in Rectangle with the Sound of Its Own Making, a video that comprises the actions, sound and even the thought processes of working electronically. In this process she reveals the environment of digital life. It´s not so clean and clear-cut, hardly a robot utopia, and hardly the vanilla space that our corporate providers would like it to be. Never mind hacking through the back door. All doors are open, dangling casually from their hinges. Baga´s title maps this piece onto Robert Morri´s early ´70s work, Box with the Sound of Its own Making, a small wooden box containing an audiotape of the sounds of the box´s construction. Simple and elegant, but beyond minimalism to process, and a suggestion that the clean objects of minimalism be brought back into the quotidian reality from whence they came. In Baga´s video, the voices in the background are, of course, the sound of the video being made: conversations, brainstorming, background sounds, objects being moved around or placed in front of the camera, laughter - not primarily a nod towards breaking up the illusion of screen-based imagery, but more interestingly, a refusal of break up the elements of the process in the creation of a seperate “object.” The object, therefore is the space of the creation of the video. Of course it is much less cut and dried than that, as the 3-D imagery allows the viewer to have different kind of encounter with the video space. The 3-D gesture is a generous one, as the space and tone become gently expansive, giving the Rectangle volume and seeming to move it out just a little from the plane of the wall. The gesture is like those of a homemade magic show; it allows poetics to emerge from within the process and the material of the video´s making. Originally published in Fourthwall, January 2011 Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected]
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