The Symbolists: Les fleurs du mal: organized by Nicole Kaack

February 22 - April 11, 2021

  • Alicia Adamerovich, Joseph Buckley, Maho Donowaki, Hilary Doyle, Clark Filio, Caroline Garcia, Eliot Greenwald, Exene Karros, Nat Meade, Tammy Nguyen, Louis Osmosis, Georgica Pettus, Johanna Robinson, Sistership TV, Alicia Smith, and Astrid Terrazas

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    THE SYMBOLISTS: LES FLEURS DU MAL

     

    In the gory aftermath of the Third Republic and the 1871 Commune, the Symbolist movement of 19th-century France turned away from the scientific rationalism and Realist reportage of an industrializing age. These artists and poets, disillusioned with the banal repetition of art in their time—“copy in copy, simulation in simulation”—looked instead to the fantastical stuff of dreams, myth, and religion to reflect on the inexorable press of modernity. Symbolism originated in literature through Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs de Mal, as well as the poetry of Stephane Mallarmé who famously wrote, “To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the poem… suggestion, that is the dream.” The aesthetic was developed and expanded by artists from Gustave Moreau and Gustav Klimt to Frida Kahlo and Paul Gaugin. Esoteric in its subjectivity, the Symbolist goal was not to represent but to suggest an amorphous and affective mood, familiar but unfixed.

        That past resonates with recognitions of the present—we look back into the mirrored glass of a similarly worrying reality, pinging with the delivery of new daily records and colored by the amber alerts of state curfews during protest. Challenging the escapist impulse with criticality and humor, the artists in this show are not dealing in pure abstraction, rather, finding ways to express injustice, trepidation, and hope for the future through new figures, contemporary or invented. Drawing on the symbolic material of popular culture, astrology, the internet, and beyond, this show responds to the expansion of virtual worlds which, as ever, run in tandem with reality.

     

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  • The Real Real

     

    Confronting the borders between perceived worlds, several works in the exhibition pose a metaphysical inquiry into the space between symbolic representation and reality. Clark Filio’s Truman Show, drawn from the popular film of the same name, addresses the impossible moment when Truman climbs a staircase along a painted backdrop of the sky to escape the surveilled and fabricated world that has been a home and cage for his entire life. Tammy Nguyen’s collages play on a similar theme through the formal, syntactical, and allegorical qualities of the letter ‘O’ in a re-imagining of Plato’s allegory of the cave. 

     

  • However, Hilary Doyle’s The Innocents, Johanna Robinson’s Imagination is defined by what lies outside of it, and Astrid Terrazas’s a fruitful being, tú rana, suggest that there can be no such escape—reality and fiction are interchangeable, composed of the infinite imaginaries of our positionalities, desires, and dreads. Doubly representing the immensity of an ocean in a rectangle of blue pastel and the sluggish action of a fishbowl brimming with glycerin, Maho Donowaki’s I’ll Swim If You Swim Too humorously indicates the futility in the search for an unmediated reality.

  • the fragment held in the hand

    conforms to the fragment holding

    the fragment — the body fragment of hand

    knows its part holding its part

    and knows that part’s reason — is to be part 

    fragment holding fragment

     

    body holding earth — I saw people

    they were all me I saw objects 

    could not any be me I walked 

    in my lower both — inside the removal

    of not me I tried to live in both

    — who is sacred to the word sacred —

     

    exfoliate the alphabet fragment spoken

    is word part — the fragment spoken

    conforms to the fragment lived

    — time holding both calendar and both

    being us all the time inside our other us

    is our living breathing both 

    —Edwin Torres, To the Rendered Excision (from Xoeteox, Wave Books)

     

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  • Criticality of Modern Symbols

    Other works symbolically address social injustice and, in several cases, call attention to the prejudice veiled within unexamined icons.  Clark Filio’s Bather and Paradise Lost query how we read the allegorical nudes of historical painting today, and his portrait of Diogenes—drawn from an 1882 painting by John William Waterhouse—depicts the Greek cynic who, through his ascetic lifestyle, criticized the conventions of Athenian society. 

  • Meanwhile, in performative videos where the artist’s body is bruised and overwhelmed by forms of sustenance, Maho Donowaki illustrates a point of tension between gestures of care and oppression. Nat Meade's ridiculous if sympathetic portraits of stoic male figures depict the obsolescence of masculine heroism. Joseph Buckley’s George Slaying Dragon recasts England’s patron saint as an enslaved individual, rebelling and, in the process of defeating a snarling white dragon—representing, perhaps, the capitalist slaver—sending it to its death beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. 

  • The object 

    that looks nothing like me  

    is the object that will probably kill me. 

    The blood cell 

    seeking the virus that looks nothing like the rest 

    will surround and terminate the danger.

     

    The invention — is in the danger.

     

    creativity redefines danger as creativity

    culture redefines creativity as danger

    who redefines danger redefines culture

     

    The story of the boy and the clock, the lesson of the teacher and the boy, 

    the will of the boy and the world, the way of the world and the people, 

    the question of the people and the wall, the falling of the wall and the people,

    the power of the people and the tweet, the alignment of the tweet and the twit,

    the addiction of the twit and the screen, the worry of the parent and the screen, 

    the teaching of the planet and the dirt, the experiment of the flirt and the threat,

    the melting of the climate and the neighbor, the color of the neighbor and the neighbor,

    the construction of the ethos and the wave, the movement of the wave and the nation, 

    the home of the brave and the free, the scripture of the key and the lock,

    the threat of the clock and the wires, the pyres of the higher and the lower, 

    the story of the globe and the boy, the freedom of the boy and the terror. 

     

    who redefines danger — redefines culture

     

    —Edwin Torres, Talisman  (from Xoeteox, Wave Books)

     

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  • World Building

     

    In opposition to the failure of historical representative forms, the show also proposes new symbols and, with them, new worlds. Playing on visual affinities, the gritty terrains in Eliot Greenwald’s Night Car series are alive with the winking suggestions of grinning skylines or elementary stick-figures. And while not imbued with figurative traces like Greenwald’s, Alicia Adamerovich’s surreal landscapes fidget and stir with the restlessness of a sentient earth. 

     

  • Exene Karros’s graphic compositions and Johanna Robinson’s Tower collect visual resonances, tuning into the likenesses that link forms across religion, technology, and the natural world. Turning to world-building through the familiar materials of our present, Louis Osmosis’s sculptures are spectacular proposals which invite the viewer to imagine the context that gave rise to such objects.

  • Georgica Pettus, Sekoi Fali, 2021 dance, 10:13 mins

     

    Running alongside the exhibition is a video program that further addresses the incredibly broadened field of mythologies and alternate realities that enrich our visual representational universe. Georgica Pettus’s Sekoi Fali plays with and humanizes the monumental figures of Christianity, while Alicia Smith embodies the Nagual of Mesoamerican folk religion who can turn from human into jaguar. 

     

  • Honoring her mother who recently passed, Caroline Garcia’s Choose Your Fighter seeks abstractions of solace and female wisdom through cooking shows and found footage. Finally, the episodes of Sistership TV bring together the formats of music video, sitcom, and seance in a headlong fantasy narrative.

  • Caroline Garcia Choose Your Fighter, 2020 VR digital video, colour, sound. 3:24 mins

    Alicia Smith, 2017
    Nagualism, Performance/Video, 3:07 mins

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