Art as Transporter

RAW, a group show at the Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn, N.Y., March 1-April 6, 2003.

What is RAW? A computer dictionary will give a long list of meanings: uncooked, unfinished, cold, rough, rude, unprepared, unmade, imprudent. A further look will indicate even more possible synonyms and variations. RAW at Smack Mellon was not an uncooked or unpolished exhibition, though the first impression of curator Denise Carvalho's installation was of an apparently chaotic and incidental collection of works on video, computer, drawing, sound, photography, and performance. This was deliberate. The works were not unfinished; they might pretend to a kind of rough, immediate quality, but all of them demonstrated a complicated, multi-layered irony, infused with the spirits of their creators. The exhibition reflected on art as a transporter of meaning in urban motion and on the physicality of urban space. The show's understated title referred to the raw and dysfunctional quality of life not only in the urban space but also in space created and defined by contemporary culture.

This subversive cultural space is visible in Charlie Citron's snapshot photograph series Joe goes around the world. Wherever Citron travels he takes with him a little G. I. Joe, described as a cowboy from Texas and representing the worst aspects of American tourist arrogance. The images are very playful, ironic, and consciously rough. They show Joe in Israel, India, Poland, China, and so on, always in places of cultural importance. It is not an accident that opposite this work there were wall drawings by Katya Sander. Two or Three Notes on Architecture originated from an official safety-manual published by the Danish State. The manual has been produced to explain to the citizen how to prevent intrusion. The artist says she is interested in "the way fear is represented, incarnated and systematized in contemporary welfare society . . . how is it named and specified through vocabulary, representation, regulations and architecture." The drawing, as enlarged and seen out of its original context, can represent anything, the same way fear can take any shape and appear in unforeseen directions.

Sally Gutierrez's City Game TV video investigates monumental architectural [Begin Page 102] elements and their relation to the people who workin them. Made during the artist's residency at the World Trade Center in 2001, it consists of six interviews with WTC workers talking about their views from the windows; its function was to uncover the hierarchy that existed inside the building and to reveal the personal relationships of the workers with the city. That the World Trade Center no longer exists now adds a very different dimension to the work. Jenny Marketou in her internet installation Streaming Raw used real-time streaming from two spy cameras; one was suspended from the ceiling of the gallery, the other from a helium balloon at the Grand Central Station in New York City, which at the time had been declared a "hard target" for terrorist attacks. The activities depicted in Alex Villar's video projection Upward Mobility articulate the desire to break free from the socially-accepted behavior; the artist has placed himself on the side of "intruders," taking the point of view of the feared "other." A similar point of view may also be seen in Washing, a 16-mm loop by Jenny Perlin; the piece shows a landscape of lower Manhattan outside the window that is being constantly washed and cleaned. Window cleaners may also be seen in Francois Bucher's video projection inside/above/under, while another segment shows a luxurious swimming pool in a close proximity to slums.

The poetics of social awareness, however, was not the most important feature of this show; it was also about various forms of collective and individual memory. Birgit Ramsauer's video Go Home speaks about personal memory connected with a voyage of a son to see his mother, while Viewing Platform, a video by Pia Lindman, examined collective memories of the ground...