• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

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. ART APRIL 1ST, 2017 IN CONVERSATION SIMON STARLING with Marcia E. Vetrocq Peripatetic and prolific, Simon Starling (b. 1967) has traveled to and across five continents since the early 1990s to research, fabricate, photograph, film, perform, and install his work. Extravagant labor and a disarming absurdity—the operative ques- tions seem to have been “what if?” and “why not?”—were wedded to the punctiliousness of a historian in early projects such as Rescued Rhododendrons, 1999, for which Starling drove seven of the unwanted bushes from Scotland (where they have proliferated as weeds) “back” to Spain, whence the plant had been imported in the 18th century. The straightforward action of the syllabically baroque Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006) consists of powering a boat across Loch Long by feeding its steam engine the very wood of which the boat was made. The predictable swamping of the cannibalized craft is a strange hybrid of success and failure. You would be forgiven for reading the project now as an allegory of mismanaged resources and rising wa- ters, particularly in light of Starling’s recurring investigations into the systems and outcomes of the global transport of materials. A large portion of Starling’s practice has unfolded as a sort of art procedural, in which unearthed facts and evidence of for- gotten encounters are interwoven in a series of crosscutting stories, a number of them featuring the works of Brancusi and Henry Moore, others centering on the reconstruction of early exhibitions of Modernist art. Archival digging, recursive photographic procedures, and an attention to technologies—bygone and cutting-edge—are fundamental to Starling’s work. To that list he more recently added a deep engagement with performance and collaboration, both prominent in his latest shows in New York. From October 14, 2016 to January 15, Japan Society pre- sented At Twilight, a multipart reconstruction of a Noh play written by Yeats and originally staged at the London home of Lady Emerald Cunard and her daughter, Nancy, on a spring evening in 1916. Starling’s sixth solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan, which opened in February and is currently on view, is the outcome of a rather lyrical “what if?”: The Liminal Trio plays the Golden Door takes the form of a hypothetical musical encounter among three immigrants detained on Ellis Island. Starling and Marcia E. Vetrocq met before the opening of both shows for an extended conversation. Marcia E. Vetrocq (Rail): The “Golden Door” of your title evokes the Statue of Liberty, and immigration policy has become a raw, divisive issue in this country since the 2016 campaign. But the migrant crisis has been mounting on both sides of the Atlantic for years. When did you first con- sider doing a project on immigration for your show in New York? Simon Starling: The project has many precedents within my practice in general. For me The Liminal Trio plays the Golden Door is very closely relat- ed to the work that I made at Mass MoCA in 2008, The Nanjing Particles, which was triggered by the story of Chinese migrant workers coming to North Adams to break a strike in a shoe factory. I came across the story at a moment when America was obsessing about the effect of the booming Chinese economy on the American economy, a conversation which is still Installation view, Simon Starling, The Liminal Trio plays the Golden Door, Casey Kaplan, New York, 2017. Photo: Jean running, I suppose. On a political level and also on a formal level, the idea Vong. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York. of the “archaeology” of a photographic image—trying to get below the surface—is key to both projects. I feel that there’s also a connection to other shows that I’ve made here at the gallery. The Bird in Space project in 2004 was about a Brancusi sculpture brought by Marcel Duchamp to the United States that was not allowed free entry as an art work but was taxed as a piece of metal. That project was prompted by the then-current situation with a steel tax, which George Bush had imposed to curry favor with the Rust Belt vote.

Load more

  156

Copy Link