April 22, 2017 Opening Reception: Thursday February 23, 6-8PM
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Simon Starling: The Liminal Trio plays the Golden Door February 23 – April 22, 2017 Opening Reception: Thursday February 23, 6-8PM Casey Kaplan is pleased to present The Liminal Trio plays the Golden Door, Simon Starling’s (b. 1967, Epsom, UK) sixth solo exhibi- tion with the gallery. The Liminal Trio plays the Golden Door is presented on the heels of Starling’s most recent collaborative project titled At Twilight, staged in 2016 by the Common Guild in Glasgow and the Japan Society in New York, in which the artist celebrated modernism’s continual presence in contemporary culture through the transformation of W. B. Yeats’ play “At the Hawk’s Well” (1916). For this exhibition, Starling expands upon his multidisciplinary practice to conjure a meeting of three musicians arriving to the United States through Ellis Island at the beginning of the 20th century. The uncovering and re-imagining of historical accounts of im- migration offers new insight into our present cultural conditions, and a potential for greater understanding. For Starling, happenings of the past are not simply remembered, but repurposed. The three musicians assembled for The Liminal Trio were selected from among a series of photographs by Augustus Frederick Sher- man (1865 – 1925), an amateur photographer who worked in the administration at Ellis Island between 1892 and 1925 and pro- duced over 250 photographs of immigrants entering the United States of America through our most historicized gateway. Typically, Sherman would photograph his subjects in their traditional folk costumes, which seem to have been worn (often for the last time) as a symbolic rite of passage. A strong sense of duality exists within each composition, for the photographs are both celebratory and analytical. Sherman revels in the cultural diversities of those who he encountered, while also objectifying his subjects and rendering them as ‘types’ to be catalogued and processed. In one photograph, a Southern Italian piper, Antonio Piestineola (one of the few immigrants to be named by Sherman) clutches his zampogna (bagpipe) to his chest, while in another an unnamed Romanian piper in rough peasant attire holds a simple wooden kaval (an end-blown flute) to his mouth as if about to play. In a third photograph, a female clog dancer from Volendam wears the national costume of the Netherlands and stands gazing expectantly into the middle distance. These three musicians, and the musical tradi- tions they would likely have brought with them, were the inspiration for a contemporary recording that brings these nearly obsolete sounds to life. Realized in New York, Sean Folsom plays the zampogna, Winne Clement blows on the kaval, and Livia Vanaver is clog dancing. This improvised session, orchestrated by Chicago-based musician Joshua Abrams, creates a spare and at times ten- tative dialogue between the three traditions - Folsom riffing on Southern Italian folk tunes such as the characteristic tarantella, Clem- ent evoking lyrical rural Romanian music, while Vanaver explores the possibilities of the traditional Dutch horlepiep (hornpipe) dance. Three speakers fed by the individual ‘voices’ of Folsom, Clement and Vanaver offer musical interpretations that are paired with repli- cas of the instruments and costumes portrayed in Sherman’s photographs. Their likenesses are fabricated in grayscale tones, as no authentic record exists to convey the colors of their clothing (though contemporary reproductions of the photographs often appear dramatically colorized). Under the supervision of costume designer Gustavo Gonzalez, a host of specialized craftspeople including tailors, milliners, and embroiderers were called upon to realize each garment. Finally, three life-size enlargements of Sherman’s origi- nal images from the archives at Ellis Island inhabit a third space and bring the project full circle. In lending Sherman’s images a material presence, Starling repositions the complexities of Ellis Island’s history within an alternate, contemporary realm that waivers between the past and present. A moment in time is isolated among these individuals amidst the twelve million who entered the U.S. between 1892 and 1954, paying heed to our natural origins as the nation’s political discord on this very topic heightens. Within each photograph's ephemera, any preconceptions of the time and place existing within the viewer are undone as our imaginations are restored to a palpable simulation of what could have been: The Liminal Trio playing at the Golden Doors of New York. Simon Starling, the recipient of the 2005 Turner Prize, has exhibited worldwide. In recent years, Starling has presented solo exhibitions at institutions such as The Japan Society, New York (2016); The Common Guild, Glasgow (2016); Rennie Collection, Vancouver (2016); Not- tingham Contemporary, England (2016); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2016); Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2015); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Quebec (2015); MCA Chicago, IL (2014); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2014); Tate Britain, London (2013); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2011); and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2008). With recent participa- tion in group exhibitions at venues such as the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY (2016) and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2015), Starling will partake in an upcoming exhibition at The Centre Pompidou-Metz, France in March of this year. The artist’s work is held in public collections such as The Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l’Arte, Turin; The Henry Moore Foundation, Herts; Kunstmuseum Basel; MCA Chicago, IL; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Seattle Art Museum, WA; SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and TATE Modern, London. Simon Starling lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. SIMON STARLING: AT TWILIGHT (AFTER W. B. YEATS' NOH REINCARNATION) FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2016—SUNDAY, JANUARY 15, 2017 Members' Opening: Thursday, October 13, 7:30 PM At the height of WWI, poet W. B . Yeats collaborated with members of the avant garde to stage his Japanese noh inspired dance play At the Hawk's Well (1916). To mark its centennial, Turner Prize winner Simon Starling reinterprets this production in an exhibition that illustrates the impact of noh on Western Modernism. Newly created masks, costumes, and a dance on video are paired with works by the 20th-century masters connected to Yeats' play, bringing to life Starling's irrepressible inventiveness. This exhibition was organized by Japan Society in collaboration with The Common Guild (Glasgow, Scotland). EXHIBITION-RELATED PROGRAMMING: LECTURE Simon Starling Friday, October 14, 6:30 PM Buy Tickets ART & DESIGN | ART REVIEW Simon Starling: Modernism Gazing Into the Past By JASON FARAGODEC. 29, 2016 Masks and Video From “Simon Starling: At Twilight,” an exhibition at Japan Society. “Modernism is our antiquity,” the historian T. J. Clark wrote in “Farewell to an Idea,” his 1999 eulogy for the art of the last century. By which he meant: As Greece and Rome served as the base line for Western culture from the Renaissance onward, modernism itself had become our model and myth, to be reinterpreted at will but never really understood. Spend half a day in Chelsea, and you will see few gods and heroes — but you will trip over archives of failed utopian collectives, photos of crumbling tower blocks, rebooted avant-garde dances and all sorts of fragments of the recent past. Ulysses may be dead, but “Ulysses” endures. Few contemporary artists have wrestled with the legacy of modernism as consistently as Simon Starling, a Scottish artist based in Copenhagen, whose previous projects have involved melting Bauhaus chairs down into beer cans or chucking a replica of a Henry Moore statue into Lake Ontario. Now, in an airtight but gratifying exhibition at Japan Society — his first at a New York City institution — he turns to William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, two modernist writers who had their own ornery gazes on the past. Yeats’s “At the Hawk’s Well,” a 1916 one-act play indebted to both Irish folklore and Japanese drama, provides the tonic note for Mr. Starling’s “At Twilight,” a forking meditation — featuring both his own art and significant historical loans — on modernism’s cross-cultural power and contemporary resonance. This is a rare outing for a non-Japanese artist at Japan Society, and it has been curated by Yukie Kamiya, the director of the institute’s art gallery. It opens with a dark, spotlit gallery featuring exquisite lacquered masks, of the sort used in Japan’s highly ritualized Noh theater, attached to charred tree trunks. (The masks were newly made from Paulownia wood by Yasuo Michii, an artisan with whom Mr. Starling has collaborated before.) Rather than recreate the props of “At the Hawk’s Well,” Mr. Starling riffs on its creators and their colleagues in wartime Dublin, Paris and Tokyo. One mask depicts Yeats with a swoop of lustrous white hair, his jaw shut by knotted strings. The one depicting Pound, who served as Yeats’s secretary and translated Noh dramas, is all white and angular, repurposing the bust of the poet sculpted by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in 1914. Already, then, Mr. Starling is both channeling Yeats’s original play and improvising, to create a remake that chases its own tail. There are other masks. A gilded one has just two slits for eyes; it represents Nancy Cu- nard, the hard-drinking heiress who opened her home to Yeats’s performers and whom Brancusi sculpted in a similarly abstract way. Another draws on Jacob Epstein’s “The Rock Drill,” a classic of Vorticist machine romance that later came to symbolize the brutality of World War I. A stern bronze mask with long animal hair depicts Michio Ito, the Japanese dancer in “At the Hawk’s Well”; he played the title bird, who protected a well of immortal- ity.