On View Program Who are we? What are we? Where did we come from? Rita Ackermann Workspace Gallery Courage A video program organized by David Leslie WHOA REWE ?WH ATA REWE? WHEREDlDWE COM EFROM? Window on Broadway by Rita Ackermann Rita Ackermann's Who Are We? What Are of an as -yet untold spiritual tradition. The seated We? Where Did We Come From? is an allegory diver to the right, literally plugged into her com- of t ransmutation, a picture of a paradise perhaps puter, provides a key to the transmutation as arriving, as the artist puts it, after the end of the she demonstrates one meaning of the painting's world. Using both the rectangular street-level sec- abundant water imagery: active with both key- tion of the Museum's Window on board and mouse, she dives into the Broadway and the semi-circular "liquid sky" of an unseen computer upper lunette, Ackermann has fab- screen-scape. ricated a faux stained glass window The densely peopled landscape using special paints directly on the of the lower panel gives rise to tran- glass. This is the third such win- scendence in the lunette. This two-part dow produced by the 26-year-old structure echoes the duality of the artist, whose work also includes Arcadian ideal, the ideal of a society in paintings on canvas, pastels, cloth- aesthetic harmony with nature: Arcadia ing design, and an audio-visual is a real place, a ruin, and a mythic project on the interactive CD-ROM region outside time. In both aspects, "magazine" BLAM! the Arcadian landscape appears impos- Born in Hungary and classical- sible, at a distance from the present ly trained at the Budapest Academy of Fine Art, and the urban world. But Ackermann's futuristic Ackermann often borrows from Old Master paint- vision, in which nature has become a blank and ings, reworking source material into a distinctive abstract backdrop for society, generates a three- style that borders on greeting card kitsch- from part scheme that opens out to include the viewer. the notebook doodles of junior high school girls The figure in the foreground, looking directly into to the sentimental sexuality of 1960s "flower the space before the picture, establishes a visual power." But ultimately this work balances on the hinge between the represented scene and the side of the secular fable. It features groupings of location of the viewer in real space; the "fourth adolescent girls and, often, animals embodying at wall" is re -opened as she establishes a link, an once innocence, compassion, and an evolved ongoing avenue of access to this "virtual world." Rita Ackermann, water· intelligence familiar from such Ackermann's neo-Neo-Ciassical tableau mod- color sketch for Who are "adult" children's literature els and tugs at human tenderness with an attitude we? Whac are we? Where ' h 1 f didwecomefrom?l 994 as C.S. Lewis C ronic es o so innocent as to be almost artless. The window's Narnia and Antoine de Saint- title, Who Are We? What Are We? Where Did We Exupery's The Little Prince. Saint-Exupery's tale Come From?, reworks that of Gauguin's vast describes the journey of an innocent androgyne Tahitian tableau, Where do we come from? What through worldly vanities to discover love as loss are we ? Where are we going? which the artist him- and death as transcendence. In the same vein, the self described as embodying "a passion of suffer- doe eyed adolescent girls in Ackermann's work ing in appalling conditions." So Ackermann envi- rush headlong through dissipated lives that con- sions a world in which fond gestures and gentle ceal and reveal secret teachings. attitudes are dangerously close to disappearance. Drawing on sources that include Gauguin, Yet her paintings are coyly limpid allegories Rembrandt, and the pastoral tradition exemplified meant to assist as spiritual guides, soliciting by Poussin, Who Are We? What Are We? Where Did affection as the operator of cultural transforma- We Come From? presents a vision of Arcadia tied tion. Here as elsewhere, her work anchors the to the "techno-hippie" youth culture of "raves, " idea of the transcendental in a teen fantasy of roving dance parties that run for hours and even simple human rituals- gestures of caring and days, featuring light shows and ecstatic altered community depicted in the picture as well as states. The lower panel bears a striking resem- those of pleasure and tender incredulity excited blance to Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds, by it. Out of the drugs and dancing of the non- while the grouping on the rock in the lower left stop "end-of-the-century party," Ackermann derives from Rembrandt's jacob Blessing the Sons retrieves clues to an arriving society at once post- of joseph. The blue figure on the rock, an under- human and all too human, as plump, sleek ani- water diver metamorphosed through her wet suit mals cry vast pools of tears. into a dolphin like alien intelligence, takes on the attributes of jacob who blesses the inauguration Laura Trippi Curator VlSlTlNGHOURS An installation by Bob Flanagan in collaboration with Sheree Rose Bob Flanagan's Visiting Hours begins and But, in terms of masochism, is Bob Flanagan ends with a question: "Why?" A poet as well as a sick? Contemporary pain practices, from consen- visual, performance, and video artist, Flanagan sual s/ m to the recent fashion craze for body has wrapped the pe ri meter of this autobiographi- piercing and tattooing, are fundamentally cal installation with a prose poem that rhythmical- masochistic. They operate societally as a form ly and repeatedly offers answers: of critique, affirming the value of "Because it feels good; ... because powerlessness within a culture that it makes me come; because I'm esteems mastery and domination.' sick ... ."' Starting at the gallery's Increasingly, death, violence, and entrance, the poem runs uninter- drastic social change pervade our rupted in a single line around the society. In the face of AIDS , escalat- space of display-along the insti- ing racial and ethnic violence, the tutional green walls that enclose continuing rise of techno-science, The Waiting Room, various the- the growing instability of geo- matic play and display areas, the politics and the environment, and video scaffolding entitled Bob even the incremental redefining of Flanagan's Sick, and the aptly gender roles, the temptation to titled Wall of Pain. The text flows respond with a stiffening of the will around odd corners, over door- is almost irresistible. Curiously, ways, and across a flight of though, alternative models to stairs. Relentlessly, "Why?" works domination are to be found where its way into every crease and wrinkle along the we least expect them-in the burgeoning self- circumference of the galleries. help industry, where issues of domination and "Why?" addresses the origins of Flanagan's submission emerge under such umbrella concepts involvement with extreme pain practices as a as "addiction," "co-dependency," and "shame"; form of pleasure (sadomasochism or "s/ m"); it in the masochistic excesses of current music points to sources as diverse as Cinderella, the nat- cultures that exalt self-surrender to the compul- ural endorphin high produced in the brain by pain sive pulse of D.j.-driven dance parties; in the dis- and exercise, and pop culture slogans ranging persion of the self into the fluid group structures from "You always hurt the one you love" to the of online computer communication; and in the ever-American "No pain, no gain!"' At the same assertion of attitudinal masochism, with the time, the installation resounds with a disquieting prevalence of piercing and bondage gear, as a question: what to do with time on your hands? ' postmodern house style for meeting the end of "I was promised an early death, but here I am still the millennium. waiting," the artist writes elsewhere.' Now perpet- These and other developments do more than ually hooked up to a tank of oxygen, Flanagan attest that a fascination with pain has arrived with at 41 is among the oldest living sufferers of cystic a vengeance. They meet the challenge of a terrify- fibrosis, a degenerative genetic illness affecting ing situation with a self that is porous and pliant, the lungs and stomach that usually is fatal by embracing an environment in which the self is early adolescence. gradually but radically being redefined. Visiting Hours stages Freud's strange drama Relinquishing the impulse toward domination and of Eros and Thanatos, in which existence unfolds advancing instead the capacity to feel as the ulti- as a ceaseless struggle between the instinct for mate, distinguishing human trait,' such forms of life and the instinct for disintegration or death. social intercourse can be understood as part of a But this appears to be a project to construct an ethics of se lf-abdication. Bob Flanagan Ascension version interpreted by Pee They evidence a determination, as Flanagan (rom the sickbed # 51nstaltation view of Visiting Hours at Sa nta Wee Herman. The installa- would have it, to fight sickness with sickness.' Monica Museum of Art, I 992 tion is designed like a And then there is art. Scott Boberg crazy stage set of a chil- As a poet, but also a stand-up comic, dren's residential hospital, replete with a torture Flanagan's performance career began with read- chamber lurking amidst the institutional cheer. ings of his own poetry that he soon incorporated Here, the dark encounter between drives for sex into s/m performance-demonstrations in the late and death is framed and buoyed up by a keen wit 1970s and 1980s in the clubs of Los Angeles .