The group exhibition Plaisance engages contemporary artistic practices that move in and out of ethnographic framing, countering progressive and predominant codes of representation by inhabiting a secondary register of historical erasures, seeming blankness, and aphasic or amnesiac gaps within cultural memory. Giving living form, color, and voice to a resistant uncanny, Plaisance redirects affective forms of visibility and legibility to trouble political signification, referentiality, and presumed narratives of historiography.

While the exhibition’s title echoes the popular entertainments and mimetic objects of fleeting desire associated with pleasantries, distractions, and trifling objects, it also evokes a more archaic understanding of plaisance as a place affording contemplation alongside a prevailing architecture—not unlike the garden pavilion or Folie structures of eighteenth century leisure. Within the exhibition at Midway, plaisance becomes a place of rupture and reorganized looking that engenders thick descriptions of gesture, object, and image, enacting an intricacy of distinctions over the sweep of generalizing abstractions.

Sven Augustijnen’s Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles series, 2008, for example, portrays African prostitutes in self-selected night poses in the streets of Brussels, framed in dialectical tension with parallel nighttime images of monuments, buildings, and interiors that trace remnants of King Leopold II’s exploitative reign and Belgium’s colonial past held over into an uneasy present tense. A book of the same title extends Augustijnen’s exploration to coincident unravelings, including the irony that streetwalkers should work the Avenue Louise commemorating Leopold’s mother while Karl Marx penned the Manifesto of the Communist Party under threat of imminent exile blocks away. The dispersed subject of Henrik Olesen’s A.T., 2012, meanwhile, orbits around British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954). Lauded as a patriot for his wartime code-breaking and seminal computing innovations, Turing’s later punishment for being homosexual included forced hormone treatments, leading to what Olesen has described as a loss of body, and his ultimate suicide. A composite portrait composed of text, collage, and quotations, A.T. reveals unified historical subjects to be the normative and coercive fictions they are.

In Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s The Microscope, 2006, it is the eyepiece of the titular apparatus that gets examined and inverted. Wryly replaced with a speaker emitting a vocoder version of the pop song Every Breath You Take, the resulting lilt of Sadr Haghighian’s vision machine is accompanied by an adjacent booklet chronicling her conversation with Evelyn Fox-Keller, professor of History and Philosophy of Science at MIT and author of The Biological Gaze. Together they analyze the semiotic sway over our everyday retinal intake and customary looking. A different step-by-step adjustment and illusionistic breakdown animates the referential impasse of Willem de Rooij’s five-part abstract weaving Silver to Gold, 2009/2011, wherein a gradual manipulation of machined linen transitions from silver to gold. Enacting a refusal of staid terms of abstraction or symbolic value, the large-scale textile panels readily absorb all surface light while deflecting signification. Subtle and exact in its literal gradation, Silver to Gold is an incisive yet withholding companion when compared to the intricate flower bouquet works often shown alongside de Rooij’s textile spectrums, including Bouquet VI, 2010, configured here with black and white tulips.

An effacement of a more archival impulse propels Gareth James’ photographic collages and provides a transition to works on view in Midway’s adjoining library. Untitled (Young Claude Lévi-Strauss with Monkey, Fragment Spirals), 2011, for example, imposes a collaged interpretation of an unexplained pedagogical diagram embedded in a late photograph of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Excerpting an untethered symbol made by a thinker who decried the possibility of any epistemological coherence in postwar culture, James superimposes the oscillating image onto a photograph of a young Claude Lévi-Strauss, taken at the time of writing Tristes Tropiques, his groundbreaking anthropological travelogue of time spent in the Amazon basin and Brazil. As with Olesen’s prying apart and laying bare the fictions of biographical representation, James lets the lost diagram of Althusser’s recalcitrant formulation obscure and darken the figure of assumed methodological authority and innovation in Lévi-Strauss.

In the here and elsewhere of Tamara Henderson’s film Neon Figure, 2013, the irrational takes recombinant form in the “tourist night” of a collapse and build scenography that savors the absence of analytic consciousness, while Jonathas de Andrade’s 4,000 Shots, 2010, uses a roll of Super-8 film to obsessively capture anonymous male faces in the streets of Buenos Aires, compressing frame by frame an aphasic climate of imminent disappearance and historical depletion. In contrast, a re-presenting of pose and encoded gesture is given further amplitude in the territorial maneuvers of Alejandro Cesarco’s Broodthaers, 2008, which succinctly adapts and recasts a mixed utterance of warning and defiance, even as Florian Zeyfang’s Introduction to a Small History of Photography – Formalist Heady Pattern Version, 2008, revisits the books and embedded images that inspired Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay, Kleine Geschichte der Photographie, adapting the speculative register of Benjamin’s experimental montage form to locate a renewed oversensitivity within today’s inscribed and increasingly pervasive image literacy.

Accompanied by an exhibition catalog, Plaisance further explores the continued relevance of such concepts as “secondary explanation,” originally formulated by anthropologist Franz Boas, and will consider how the genealogical imperative active within such artistic practices contributes to an articulation of ethnographic framing as a history of the present.

– Fionn Meade

.

at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis

until 22 June 2013

.

Natasha Sadr Haghighian, The Microscope, 2006

(left) Willem de Rooij, Bouquet VI, 2010, Courtesy the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; (right) Henrik Olesen, A.T., 2012

Henrik Olesen, A.T., details, 2012

Willem de Rooij, Bouquet VI, 2010, Courtesy the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Willem de Rooij, Silver to Gold, 2009, Courtesy the Aishti Foundation, Beirut

Willem de Rooij, Silver to Gold, 2009, Courtesy the Aishti Foundation, Beirut

Sven Augustijnen, Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles, 2008, Courtesy Musee d’Ixelles, Brussels

Sven Augustijnen, Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles, Frame 1, Dozette, 105 avenue Louise, ‘Ixelles to its colonial pioneers’, commemorative monument near the ponds of Ixelles opposite the Abbaye de la Cambre, Elisabeth, 142 Avenue Louise, 2008

Sven Augustijnen, Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles, Frame 2, Roses in the King’s Garden, below the roundabout, 370-372 Avenue Louise, Residence of Louise-Marie, 379 Avenue Louise, 2008

Sven Augustijnen, Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles, Frame 7, ‘Slave recaptured by dogs’ by Louis Samain, 1898, 506-508 Avenue Louise, Valerie, 511 Avenue Louise, 2008

Sven Augustijnen, Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles – Recueil d’articles, 2008, Courtesy Musee d’Ixelles, Brussels

(foreground) Alejandro Cesarco, Broodthaers, 2008, (background) 35mm slides of drawings from a series “De La Physionomie Humaine et Animale” by Charles Le Brun, ca. 1670, Selected by Willem de Rooij, (right) Jonathas de Andrade, 4,000 shots, 2010

(left) Tamara Henderson, Neon Figure, 2013, (right) Gareth James, Untitled (Sir John Soane Bust with White Regular Circle), 2011, Untitled (Edward Curtis with White to Black Spiral), 2010, Untitled (Young Claude Levi-Strauss with Monkey, Fragment Spirals), 2011

Gareth James, Untitled (Sir John Soane Bust with White Regular Circle), 2011, Untitled (Edward Curtis with White to Black Spiral), 2010, Untitled (Young Claude Levi-Strauss with Monkey, Fragment Spirals), 2011

(foreground) Alejandro Cesarco, Broodthaers, 2008, (background) 35mm slides of drawings from a series “De La Physionomie Humaine et Animale” by Charles Le Brun, ca. 1670, Selected by Willem de Rooij

Alejandro Cesarco, Broodthaers, 2008

Josh Smith at STANDARD, Oslo

until 22 June 2013

.

Untitled [OSLO #01], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #02], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #03], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #04], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #05], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #06], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #07], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #08], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #09], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #10], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #11], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #12], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #13], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #14], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #15], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #16], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #17], 2013

Untitled [OSLO #18], 2013

Untitled [OSLO CERAMIC #01], 2013

Untitled [OSLO CERAMIC #02], 2013

Untitled [OSLO CERAMIC #03], 2013
.

Courtesy of the artist and STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo

Photographer: Vegard Kleven

Smash-up (a synonym of accident, crash, collision) is the word from which the term “mash-up” has been derived in Jamaican Creole: a song consisting entirely of recombined parts of existing ones.

For his second solo exhibition at Fluxia, Andrea De Stefani created a dry garden based on the aggregation of materials and forms of discordant origins, a landscape designed from the reconfiguration of residual forms. The elements that De Stefani has identified, collected and used as a matrix for his sculptures come from a specific environment: the margins of the industrial zone and the urban periphery, a terrain vague described by French landscape architect Gilles Clément in his definition of the “third landscape”.

Roots intertwined with plastic debris, scraps readapted to nests, moss-covered industrial leftovers are some of the forms generated by the merging of contingent environmental and cultural features.

Defining a preferential path within the gallery space and interacting with its geometry, De Stefani draws a crystallized panorama that marks the actual degree of humanization in a new, natural balance.

.

at Fluxia, Milan

until 25 June 2013

.

Polygonal Lasso, 2013

The Roots, 2013

Polygonal Lasso, detail, 2013

Smash-Up, 2013, exhibition view

Smash-Up, details, 2013

Hole (2), 2013

Hole (2), 2013

Hole (2), detail, 2013

Jackson Stain, 2013

Tough Life, 2013

Tough Life, detail, 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp: Seascapes

at Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles

until 29 June 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp, Seascape (moontrail and trees), 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp, Dress (moons and stars), 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp, Trees and moon, 2012-2013

Silke Otto-Knapp, Stage with boats, 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp, Stage with boats (blue and silver), 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp, Stage with shooting stars (blue and gold), 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp, Stage with shooting stars, 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp, Swimmers (blue and silver), 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp, Seascape (coastline and eclipse), 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp, “Seascapes”, installation views at Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, CA, 2013

Courtesy of Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles