Ilona Anderson

(I do realize that it's not Tuesday, but this show closes this weekend, so I'm posting it now)

        Sort of a cop-out first post back, because I had to write this review for a class, but the show is AMAZING, and since I already had something written on it, it seemed silly to write something new...

        In her solo gallery show Dwell Ilona Anderson pulls from her personal history, having lived under Apartheid in South Africa. On the gallery's website she describes the interactions in her "improvisational structures" (drawn tree houses) as "quirky and unpredictable". Ilona Anderson "Dwell": A Drawing Installation is on view at the Kingston Gallery in Boston's SOWA district through March 27th (it opened the 2nd). Coming into the gallery on an unforgivably unpleasant and rainy day, I had the pleasure of viewing the installation uninterrupted by the presence of other viewers, and was able to truly enter into Anderson's built world.
        The exhibition is comprised of two rooms, the large main room of the gallery and a smaller second room. The first room reads more as an "installation" as the show title suggests, the drawings (as large as ~10x30') flowing into one another and placed at all levels of the wall, while the second room is comprised of smaller (~2-3') drawings hung almost exclusively at eye level, which exist more separately from one another. Here I will focus on the pieces which make up the larger installation.
        To enter into the gallery space one must walk up a ramp parallel to the window-front, and walking up, straight ahead is the beginning of Anderson's installation. The first inclination is to get as close as possible, examining the tiny details drawn in fluorescent and glitter pens on black and a variety of gray papers. The drawings are treehouses, awkwardly pieced together in a way that is reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine, except one which probably wouldn't work- the structures seem haphazard at best. They are a mixture of natural trees and odd metal tubing and hinges, which mark them as imaginational structures. In the first drawing there are two figures, a man and a woman, the man sucking on the woman's breast. The image is repeated in the second drawing as well, and the remaining figures throughout the exhibition are for the most part lounging or engaged in various sexual acts.
        The paper is thick, almost tangible, and each piece is cut into jagged forms which are then pieced together, the drawings overlapping onto each page. They are not like a puzzle though, the pages run over one another and gaps are left between. Some pieces are connected by thin, scraggly looking shapes. As I backed away from the wall it became clear that the fragmented arrangement of the papers mirrored the haphazard treehouse structures inside Anderson's drawings. Here she has managed to create structures that are simultaneously chaotic and clearly intentional. Every connection, whether it be a strip of paper or logs tied together in ink, no matter how crooked or strange, has the distinctive touch of the human hand.

        Being carried through the dream-like narrative (I say dream-like because the drawings are so obviously unrealistic- but as if dreaming they are deceptively believable while viewing them), I begin to recognize the fluorescent and glitter lines under the gallery lights as gel pen, the connection to my own childhood furthering the fantastical feel of the drawings. The brightly colored lines are contrasted by Anderson's use of black ink, both in line work and in fields of black, often on black paper, creating an effect that looks almost like velvet.
        The escapist nature of the drawings begins to be interrupted as I begin to notice strange things happening within the drawings. It starts with a woman who is hanging from a hook by her braided hair. Once attention has been drawn to her hair, I begin to notice braids all over the drawings, both attached to heads and independent. Suddenly it becomes apparent that much of the "rope" in the drawings is actually braided hair, such as on a rope ladder and connecting parts of the treehouses. The hair ducks in and out of the drawings through suspicious holes, which appear also in places where strange liquid seems to be seeping in. In one section a naked woman knits, and towards the bottom her knitting dissolves into a mass of fluorescent liquid, disappearing into one of these holes. This melting fabric is repeated in other places, in one drawing a dress seeps off a figure. Another figure wears a mask and balances four others on her head. The surreal imagery seems to be pulling from some sort of mythology, whether it is one that is personal or cultural I could not guess, but the imagery is strong, and curious.

        Looking at the pictures online (before coming into the gallery) I had been skeptical of Anderson's use of the word "installation" in the title of the exhibition. I realize that the term installation does not require that the work be 3D, however in my experience what I would truly consider "installations" were works that could be experienced, a physical space that could be entered into. The idea of a "drawing installation" seemed sort of contradictory, perhaps a word that was only being used to describe the way the works were laid out on the wall.
        What Anderson has created however, is truly an installation. Aptly titled "Dwell", the drawings are not only of dwellings (treehouses) but they allow the viewer to almost literally be inside them. To dwell for a moment within them. Through her drawings, Anderson has seemingly tapped into some kind of shared imagination. The viewer is acutely aware that she is looking into Anderson's experiences and mind's eye, but she is there. Anderson has pulled us into her own world, but in it she is speaking to shared experiences; the quiet painful moments, the quirkiness, feelings of instability, joy, sex. In her drawings she has captured a spectrum of human existence that the viewer is able to enter into, and I believe that this is her goal in creating these spaces. It is as experiential as something you could physically be inside. So installation? I say yes.


If you're in Boston you can check out Dwell at the Kingston Gallery (it's only open through the 27th though!)



images: kingstongallery.com & shambhalatimes.org

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith 1954-

        I meant to write about Kiki Smith around the time of SMFA's InsideOut sale (as she had a piece in it; Born last image - one of her many depictions of the red riding hood tale) but somehow I managed not to do so.
        Kiki Smith is one of those artists where I've had an impossible time choosing images to put up here. This is not only because I love her work so much (definitely one of the artists I aspire to be like), but also because she works across so many mediums that it's absolutely impossible to give any kind of window into the breadth of her work. Nevertheless, I have chosen some of my favorites, and tried to give a small taste of what she's about.
        Smith has said that she strongly identifies with her gender, and it is definitely clear in her work, which re-contextualizes and reconstructs stories, myths, and histories; through her female eye. The two sites I've included here have way more information about her than I could possibly share or even summarize, so I suggest you take a look at one or both.

-awesome MoMA interactive site from their 2003 show Kiki Smith: Prints, Books & Things with lots of her work and lots of info.
-Art:21 on Kiki Smith (in the "Stories" episode)






images: pbs.org & moma.org

Nathalie Djurberg

Nathalie Djurberg 1978-

        I was attempting to organize my studio today, and found a section of a magazine page (I can't even tell what magazine it's from) that a little sleuthing revealed I had ripped out in 2008. It was a brief review of Nathalie Djurberg's show Turn into Me, which was at the Fondazione Prada April-June 2008. The short paragraph was accompanied by the second photograph I've posted here (which is from her animation We Are Not Two, We Are One), which of course caught my attention.
        While I love her work as a whole, I'm going to focus less on the content of her animations (which are wildly graphic, both sexually and violence-wise, so if you decide to watch one you've been warned) because it is less of an interest to me than the manner in which she presents the videos. I will say regarding the content that it was in many ways refreshing to see someone (particularly a young attractive female) tackling such rough (and surrealist) topics that especially in today's culture are being closeted away. The animations are no doubt offensive, but it's certainly no accident.
        As I mentioned, what really most interests me about her work is the presentation, which from what I've been able to gather, typically culminates in a really cohesive environmental installation. Too often in galleries and museums I find myself peering into a dark room, watching a few seconds of a video or film, and ducking out. I feel like many people do not even go that far and simply write off the small rooms. This is not to suggest that video/animation/film can not exist effectively on its own, because it obviously does and that would be an absurd statement, but in terms of the gallery/museum setting, I think her method is a million times more engaging, particularly for the kinds of animations she's making. You literally enter into her strange world. Without them the animations are still interesting, both visually and conceptually, but something is almost left to be desired, and the environments really seem to make everything come together and complete.
        The bizarre environments (large butts rising out of the floor, strange caves, mazes of giant otherworldy flowers) are accompanied by the audio of her animations, which is always done by Hans Berg. The unease and eeriness of the music really completes the atmosphere (at least, as from what I can gather and have seen online, not having been able to see her work in person myself).
        There's a really nice blog post on her work itself here, which is definitely worth checking out if you're even minutely interested.


(I couldn't direct link this first link so: select "exhibitions", then "exhibition archive", "2008" and "Nathalie Djurberg")
-Interactive map of Turn into Me at the Fondazione Prada with really cool panoramic views (click the circular arrows then hold down the mouse to move around, and I'd recommend the full screen. Why doesn't every gallery have this feature?!)
-Press release for Turn into Me at the Fondazione Prada
-Walkthrough of Experiment at the 2009 Venice Biennale




images: various sources; 1&4 are of Turn into Me, and 3 is of Experiment

2009 wrap-up

        In case you haven't been following my every move this year, here are my top ten favorite discoveries (all are artists that I had not known of before this year, since I sometimes write about long-time influences of mine):

April 18th : Bianca Casady (knew of her before 2009, but not her artwork)
April 29th : Jan Švankmajer
June 5th : Nadine Byrne
June 7th : Miwa Yanagi
July 24th : Compagnia della Fortezza
July 29th : Andrea Marshall
August 12th : Ali Scarpulla
September 23rd : Bert & Bertie
October 9th : Susanna Majuri
December 21st : Miru Kim




        I realize that the majority of this list is women, and while this did not surprise me (I tend to seek out female artists), I was slightly surprised after a bit of investigation, that the reasoning for this is also partially that the male artists that I've written about this past year are almost entirely artists I had prior knowledge of (and therefor did not include). This coming year I'll try to find some guys who are new to me.

images (top to bottom): Miwa Yanagi, Bert & Bertie, Andrea Marshall & Susanna Majuri

Ahmed Abdalla

        This past Thursday I had the pleasure of attending Ahmed Abdalla's opening for his show Melody and Witness, which is currently up at GASP Arts in Brookline, MA. Abdalla's statement for the show reads as follows;

        In melody and witness, there is anxiety about what is happening and what might never happen. There is frustration, sometimes, with the impossibility of communication.
        Humility and arrogance, power and greed, guilt, redemption, forgiveness, ambiguity, paradox and contradiction are all present in this art event."

        This "art event" (described by Abdalla as something that lies between theater and fine art - his background is in both stage design and fine arts) incorporates elements of painting, drawing, sculpture, video projection, sound and light, culminating in a wildly powerful installation. He has effectively controlled every aspect of the experience within the space, and the effect is overwhelming.
        The viewer enters through the street entrance to the gallery, and is immediately confronted by a small space, a temporary wall covered in pencil marks, and a curtain to the left. Entering into the actual gallery, it is dark. The lights are set up to alternate between two overhead bulbs, darkness, and lighting underneath a table that is set up, with a large glass of oil and tar set next to a slab of special type of tar that has the appearance of both wax and charcoal. Small beads (I'm unclear on what they actually were) cover the ground, Abdalla explained that he hoped visitors would step on them and feel that they had done something wrong (something that I certainly felt before having the discussion with him about it). The second smaller room is pitch black, aside from a video projection into a pedestal sink, a man's hands scrubbing to get almost gold brown oil of his hands under running water.
        By nature of the piece, it really must be experienced (and I encourage anyone in the Boston area to do so) to understand the true power of it. Abdalla has extreme mastery over experiential language; his political and emotional message can almost be sensed without explanation or text.

Information on visiting the art event Melody and Witness:

GASP Arts
362-4 Boylston Street
Brookline, MA 02445
617.418.4308

The gallery is open Thursday - Saturday 11am-5pm and is less than two blocks from the Green D line Brookline Hills stop.




images: taken by me, c. Ahmed Abdalla Melody and Witness

Reed + Rader

Back to normal posting from my 2 week hiatus! Midterms are over and I am ready to go.

        And of course I am back with something bizarre and fascinating. I usually try not to post more than four images, but since these were just so amazing, and because I've been gone for two weeks, I possibly went a little overboard. But I'm not apologizing, because as I said, the images are amazing.
        Reed + Rader is made up of fashion (photography/ video/ installation/ graphics) duo Pamela Reed and Matther Rader. What initially attracted me to their work was the strange feel and unconventional look. Two minutes into their website I was hooked.
        I can not tell you much about the artists themselves, other than that they are 26 and live in New York. Their website also states that they "enjoy cats, stuffed animals, nintendo, pizza, robots, deli sandwiches and computing on the internet". I imagine that they are fun to be around. What I can speak to is their work.
        While all of their work is very different, it is all distinctively theirs. Looking through their website, I began to notice that images were moving (a startling discovery at first), sometimes animated very subtly (a blink or breath). While many of their photographs and videos are simply set up to be strange and other-worldly, many of them have also had some sort of outside intervention, whether that be drawing strange sci-fi additions over the photos, collage, photo manipulations, and animation. While I am always excited to see anything different going on in fashion advertisement, their work is particularly interesting because it also speaks to other things, such as technology, medium and contemporary culture. Their work very successfully resides in both the worlds of fashion and art, and comments on both.

I know I always say this, but you really, seriously, need to look at their website. I couldn't post the moving images or their videos here, and there is just so much more on the website that I wish I could've posted. All of it really.

their website -so many amazing things here
their blog meowzas -has a complete list of their other projects and sites (flickr, youtube etc) on the links page






images: reedandrader.com
(last one is a video still)

Wild Things' Forts

        This past Tuesday I wrote a lesson plan about forts (for my cultural/developmental art ed class) so when I saw these I knew I absolutely had to post them. I'm not 100% on the concept of the project, which is supposedly Where the Wild Things Are inspired (all this extra nonsense is starting to be overload and taking away from the actual movie a little for me, but I guess it's to be expected with such an adored story). Anyway, the project seems to have been inspired by a similar project Kelly Burgess did, where she asked people to build forts and fill them with what they love, then photographed them.
        The project itself is a collaboration between the "booooooom" arts blog, and "We Love You So", Spike Jonze and Co.'s blog. (And because of their involvement the prize for the winner of the project was a "bus shelter sized" Where the Wild Things Are poster! not bad...) Basically booooooom told their readers to build forts and send them a picture.
        I won't get too into depth regarding what I think fort-building is about visually and artistically, since I just basically wrote a paper on it, but I will say that the seemingly universal desire to create these spaces is very interesting... Not surprisingly my favorites were the ones with really beautiful lighting, but all of the different fabrics and materials used are really great. Looking through the eight pages (!) of forts really made me want to make one of my own. I might have to in these coming winter months.

Forts 1, Forts 2, Forts 3, Forts 4, Forts 5, Forts 6, Forts 7, Forts 8
booooooom blog
We love you so blog
Kelly Burgess' website




images: booooooom.com

Beverly Semmes

        Beverly Semmes (a graduate of SMFA) gave a lecture at the MFA yesterday. Her work is often described as, and certainly appears to be, very feminist, so I was surprised and interested to hear that this was not her foremost concern, or even something that she had originally considered. Semmes described how one of her earlier pieces had been written up as a "pool of menstrual blood", and how she had been surprised and embarrassed, thinking that she had simply been making landscapes.
        It is impossible in contextualizing Semmes' work to ignore the feminist connotations of what she has created, intended or not. She works in female garments, placed together with empty vessels (either clay or glass, both of which are made by coiling). In order to understand where Semmes is really coming from though, it is important to look back at where she is stemming from.
        Out of grad school Semmes and her boyfriend (now husband) moved to a psychiatric hospital - where he worked and they were offered free housing. There Semmes became consumed by the hospital's extremely well manicured garden. She began to making garments which reflected the space, and making super-8 films of friends wearing the garments and walking around the garden (second image). It is here that Semmes identity as an artist began to become more apparent. She described the way no one could quite do it the way she wanted. People moved too fast, looked back at the camera, overacted. It was obvious that even if she could not express it at the time, she had a clear intentionality for these pieces. She described it as something like the "marking" or "claiming" of space.
        This continued into her other pieces. By using scale, color, and once even smell, Semmes has a complete control over space. She chooses colors which she describes as both beautiful and nauseating, sometimes with a goal of "color contamination", where nothing is safe from the color, reflecting off of walls, clothes and skin of observers. She plays with this even further in pieces where the garment is the same color as the walls, making it not only difficult to locate but almost claiming the entire room as her art. She ups the scale in every one of her pieces, making dresses that are unwearably huge and with oddly pushed proportions.
        One of her more interesting pieces (in my opinion) was a small room, with orange curtains surrounding it, a couple of red pots, and a large circle of tan bandaids stuck to the floor in the middle of the room. Semmes states that although it cannot be taken too literally (which would leave no place for the pots) she thinks that the bandaids were in some ways standing in for skin, and the curtains one of her dresses. This places the viewer in an undefined space, between skin and fabric, something I thought was really cool, and goes along with her interest in marking or claiming space.
        She showed and discussed work than I can describe here (I unfortunately was unable to find pictures of most of this work, including much of what I was so interested in), but some other things she showed included giant fluorescent yellow "poops" with a guard dressed in the same yellow, a sea of pink fabric (the guard again dressed in the same color, and often chosen to be an older woman), video and images of Semmes watching her feet (an exploration, she says, of the self-absorption involved in being an artist), and a collaboration with a dance studio - something which she again like her early super-8 films, disliked her lack of control over, and ended up making new work in response to this.
        If you ever get an opportunity to see her work, I could not advise more that you do so. It is difficult to find too many images of her work on the web, and that aside her work is of an extremely experiential nature, and I have a feeling that photos only begin to scratch the surface.

Semmes' website
70min conversation lecture with Semmes and Glenn Adamson at the PA ICA




images: various sources including beverlysemmesstudio.com

Karl Baden

        This past Thursday I went to another photographer's lecture at my school with less than high expectations and came away with a fresh view on things.
        I went to the lecture (Boston area photographer Karl Baden) only knowing of Everyday, which he began in 1987, and consists of straight on neutral images of Baden's face, taken once a day for what is coming up on 23 years. (I haven't seen the project in person, and had only seen documentation of it as it was presented in the Howard Yezerski Gallery in 2007 - as small photographs arranged chronologically on three walls of a room). An interesting concept, but I was unsure what made it too different from all the (horrendous) time lapse photo a day nonsense everyone is doing of themselves on youtube these days.
        As it turned out, not only is Baden's body of work much more expansive than this (not a surprise, I was not expecting that this had been his only project) but the different ways Everyday have been presented were also particularly interesting and made a good argument for the ability of photography to be entirely transformed by the way it's presented.
        Baden started the project based on his interest in incremental change, specifically the way that if you look at the pictures one by one in order change is hardly noticeable, but if you look at the first and the last it's entirely in your face. He has made an effort to show the series of photographs differently each time, and the setup has ranged from simply being installed on a wall (such as at the Yezerski Gallery, where they were available individually for sale for I forget, something like $10), to buttons of just his eye for each election year, to all shrunken down to barely thumbnail size and featured on a single piece of paper, to two time lapsed pieces shown together - of the same video length but increasing by different increments of time - one by day and one by month. He has also made a special piece, covering a year in the 1990's when he was diagnosed with and overcame prostate cancer. The piece is a ~15minute time lapse of the year's worth of faces, with audio from conversations with doctors and family members. The piece is a particularly strong look into the effects of cancer, which are so infrequently seen by those who are not personally effected by it. Comparable to Hannah Wilke's self portraits of her deterioration from Lymphoma (a major difference being that she passed away from it, in 1993), Baden's work is particularly strong because you are confronted with extremely personal dialog, while being looked directly in the eye by Baden's thinning face.
        His other and earlier work also displays a heavy interest in time and the ability to occupy more than one space in one time, (or visa versa) as well as a much more humorous edge. He began with street photography and self-portraits while traveling the across US in his twenties, which he then described as "self-images"- because he believed they were not self-reflective, something he now laughs about acknowledging that they couldn't have been more so. The images are both awkward and funny, featuring things such as his open fist around his stubbled chin against a sunset, and employed a great deal of double exposing (all of his great strange work was done pre-photoshop, and usually in camera, though in a later project also by cutting up prints and inserting himself into other photographs). This evolved to using sheets of paper to plan out entire roles of film so that the contact sheet would create a surrealistic mutant composed entirely of Baden's body parts. He also created collages, scratched and burned negatives and used selective toning (later abandoning such projects that were non-replicable, something he believes is an important part of photography). Though much of his work is humorous, he notes that it is always "about photography".
        Other projects he presented included images created by printing pieces of the negatives that are next to one another on the film (something that is done more frequently now, but he did not know of anyone doing at the time, and used to explore the idea of two spaces existing in one time), the documentation of his wife's pregnancy and his daughter's babyhood (culminating in a book with simultaneously humorous and yet very serious pages from his diary at the time), and a project where he inserted himself into pictures that have ended up with particular weight in photo history.
        An all around interesting man... I really liked the way he thinks.

All of the Everyday shots
Baden's Yezerski Gallery page
Boston.com write-up of the 2007 show at the Yezerski Gallery
Covering Photography Baden's web project, "a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design."




images: various sources, c. Karl Baden

Peter Callesen

        I entered into Peter Callesen's world through his performance piece Palace of Dreams, which consisted of a white castle floating in the middle of a lake, to which the viewer would be rowed out to (by Callesen), left alone in the castle for half an hours, then picked up and rowed back to shore. The piece is very representative of Callesen's work, which in its playful nature examines greater concepts, existing simultaneously in reality and a strange dream-like state.
        A post could be written for each of the mediums Callesen works in, which is not to say that his work is not cohesive, because it certainly is, rather that his body of work is so large and the attention paid to each section of what he does is such that it seems silly to try and tackle all of Callesen in one shot. Because of this, I will keep it relatively brief and can only plead that you check out his website for a more comprehensive taste.
        In subject matter, it is easy to see why I am attracted to Callesen's work, he repeatedly goes back to my three favorite things; birds, skeletons and houses. His work is executed so perfectly that one wonders if he is possibly insane. In particular his papercuts, which are absolutely breathtaking, have such a degree of perfection and minute detail that it seems both obsessive and unreal.
        In his artist statements Callesen refers to fairy tales, and the magic and in some ways tragic implications of papercut - something that is reflected in many of his pieces, through delicate images of death and decay. One of his installations (untitled, last image shown here) requires the viewer to "bend down to level of a child" to enter. It is clear that Callesen is playing with connections to childhood, and perhaps childhood interpretations of the world.
        Callesen is also a performance, installation, and 2d artist and sculptor.

Callesen's website (lots of images, various writing pieces done on Callesen, artist statements, current exhibitions, etc etc)




images: petercallesen.com

Joyce McDaniel

        Last week Joyce McDaniel came into GASP (the gallery where I work) to drop off her submission for Bag It!, our gala silent auction this Friday, and I was reminded of how much I absolutely love her work. McDaniel teaches at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and I took a course with her in the fall of last year. The class, which was an introduction to welding, had three teachers, and they started the course by each giving a short presentation on their own work, something that was unique (to my personal experience) at the school, and something that I thought was really important and exciting.
        I immediately fell for McDaniel's work, which juxtaposes delicate dress form and handmade paper with steel into the absolutely most amazing and tactile sculptures. The pieces seem directly representative of McDaniel herself, who is not an imposing person (her small stature belies the strength of her work) and is very sweet, but is also an extremely strong and inspiring woman. Her pieces speak powerfully about identity, femininity, and communication, and truly read as visual texts.
        My favorite series of hers makes reference to Virginia Woolf, who McDaniel feels a particular connection to,
        "Virginia Woolf queried what it means to be female; what it means to bear burdens of subordination, accommodation, patterns of lower expectations, rage, even quiet despair. Her life, work and death have struck a resonant cord within me. She chose to own her own death by filling her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse. In my attempt to understand that event, I created a series of work paying sculptural homage to her. This piece is part of a series of work dedicated to Virginia Woolf."
(statement specifically in reference to Monday or Tuesday, last piece shown here)
        McDaniel captures Woolf in a poetic way that can only be explained as a visual equivalent to Woolf's own writing. One can sense the exact "quiet despair" and weight she has described. McDaniel's decision to include the soft round rocks in these pieces makes them particularly strong. Anyone familiar with Woolf's story will read it in the pieces, and visually it is a stunning choice.

McDaniel's website




images: joycemcdanielart.com

Joan Fontcuberta & Pere Formiguera

        If I constructed a list of past exhibitions that I wish I could have seen first hand, Joan Fontcuberta & Pere Formiguera's Fauna (1987) would possibly be at the very top of the list.
        Fauna, also referred to as Secret Fauna and Dr. Ameisenhaufen's Fauna, originally released as a "serious" piece of journalism and later turned exhibition, was set up as the "long lost" zoological findings of "Dr. Ameisenhaufen", a German who had "mysteriously disappeared" in 1955. The exhibition included a collection of photographs of strange animals (both in the field and in laboratories), field notes (in German and English), sketches, x-rays, tapes of the animal's sounds, dissected and reconstructed stuffed specimen, letters and diaries, and a film with people talking about Ameisenhaufen's life.
        Everything in and about the exhibition was fake. Fontcuberta made the images, and Fomiguera wrote the accompanying text. (Ameisenhaufen and Fomiguera both translate to "anthill", and Ameisenhaufen's assistant Hans von Kubert bears a striking oral similarity to Joan Fontcuberta.) The photographs, which are really just too fantastic to believe in the first place, were created through photocollage as well as by dissembling taxidermy and creating new frankenstein creatures. Fomiguera perfects the scientific jargon to pull things together in a way that is just over the top enough to make the viewer question if it's for real.
        I believe that the project was brilliant. The playfulness and humor is perfect, and it was executed, as I mentioned, to just the right degree. In her September 1988 review of the show for the New York Times, Roberta Smith questions if it's truly "art". It is always risky to try and pin down what "can" and "can't" be labeled art, and she acknowledges this, then continues on as though she is some sort of hero by confronting such a frequently danced around question. Though she does call the exhibition wonderful, and attempts to back up her argument with references to other controversial pieces and stating whether she considers them to be "art" or "something else" I have to say that I think she is pretty off on this one. I'll keep it brief because I could write a whole essay in response to hers, but she says in reference to Fauna as well as works by Mapplethorpe and Hockney, "...all this work seemed to reside in a kind of esthetic no man's land between art and something else, a something else that was in some ways more beautiful, skillful and accessible and, above all, more instantly consumable than actual art" - suggesting that art has to be on some sort of high, inaccessible level in order to be considered art. I think that this is crap, and that Fauna is a perfect example of art that doesn't need to be picked apart and ambled over in order to be appreciated.
        The duo, as well as museums and galleries that displayed the project, also received criticism because of its "deceptive" nature. Though after a moment of serious examination it is clearly a spoof, people felt as though it called the "authority of the photograph into question", and wrote it off (much like Smith) as a "literary hoax" vs. a piece of art. This seems even more silly to me than the last issue, because though in the 80's there was not photoshop and images were not being manipulated as frequently as they are now, photographs have been altered since their invention in the 1800s. It seems absolutely ludicrous to me that people were up in arms about this, when things such as spirit photography have been engineered into reality since the accidental realization of double exposures. If it does not immediately occur to you that you should second guess a scientific study involving photographs of winged monkeys then you should be worried about yourself, not the authenticity of photography. It is this authenticity that photography is so frequently inherently given that Fontcuberta and Formiguera were attempting to playfully call attention to.
        Anyway, I think it is most undoubtedly art (because what good is art if it's a. only accessible to the high and elite, and b. it can't occasionally make you think AND laugh?) and that it's a great piece. There exists a book of the entire "study", but it would seem that it's somewhat hard to come across. Hopefully some day I'll get to see a copy. Until then, try a google search! (If anyone can find a good link with the images feel free to post it, I couldn't find one).

Fontcuberta's (extremely sparse) website
September 1988 NYTimes article
July 1988 NYTimes article, also by Smith





images: various sources, c. Joan Fontcuberta & Pere Formiguera