Listen to a podcast about this art on In/Visible.
Is my crotch supernatural? Let me tell you why I ask. A large
photograph by Swedish artist Annika von Hausswolff called Self
Portrait in the Studio with Flashlight and Pulled Down Pants stars
her crotch, dead center, encircled by a halo of light. The halo,
reflected on the camera lens, comes from the glaring flashlight she
holds in one hand, which is pointed right at you, the viewer. There is
plenty of underlying feminist humor in this photograph. But there is
just as much menace. The source of the menace is harder to pin down. It
might be the artist herself: In the hand not holding the flashlight,
she clicks the shutter switch. She controls the whole operation, so if
she’s under some kind of threat (her eyes are closed either in ecstasy
or terror), she’s part of its mechanism. What’s really eerie is the
dark, empty room she’s in, with a single light pressing in from her
left. Without being theatrical, von Hausswolff has taken us into a
scary wilderness, a foreign place, where you’re exposed, and where
everything you look at seems to be looking back at you.
No less disturbing—though very different in style—are
the works of two other female Swedish artists, the well-known Nathalie
Djurberg and the also fairly established Johanna Billing, currently
featured at Howard House in an exhibition curated by Swedish-born
gallery manager Sara Callahan, Ask a Banana, Baby: Contemporary
Swedish Video and Photography. (The title comes from a mishearing
of an ABBA song.) The show raises the question: My goodness, is Sweden
okay?
At the very least, it’s quite the alluring outpatient, misbehaving
gorgeously. Djurberg’s Claymation digital videos, which have risen to
fame just in the last few years, are full of assaults: assaults on the
viewer’s presumed decency, puppets assaulting one another, thick
strands of breast milk from a lascivious woman assaulting the throats
of hungry babies, hungry babies assaulting the breasts of said
woman.
For all this, architecture is the real operative behind the scenes
of the show. Callahan smartly chose two Djurberg videos that
demonstrate her use of architecture as a kind of infected skin or
metaphor for infiltration—apropos, considering Sweden’s lurching,
anxious transition out of relative isolation and monoculture.
Djurberg’s Feed All the Hungry Little Children (2007) begins
with a brief shot of a disheveled, short-skirted woman walking past a
white facade to its tunnel-infested reverse side. The orgylike feeding
that follows is a shocking climax, but on repeat viewings, what’s just
as unnerving are the naked babies swarming from the building’s crevices
toward the woman, like the ants out of the man’s palm in Luis
Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. In
Djurberg’s other video, In Our Own Neighbourhood (2007), a
building bleeds. It’s a white old-world mansion subjected to ransacking
and ruination by thieves, savages, and sadists, all to ominously
childlike music by Djurberg’s usual collaborator, Hans Berg.
By contrast, von Hausswolff’s photographs use unplaceable, anonymous
interiors as a force of uneasiness. Billing goes in yet another
direction. Her video Look Out! (2003) is in a setting of total
banality. Teenagers follow a real-estate agent around, not speaking but
looking at almost-finished condos for sale. Nothing
happens—again, there’s a dearth of theatricality, except the
basic sense you get that these are not actual customers—yet
there’s a mood of dread and entrapment. The teenagers gravitate
immediately toward the condo’s seams, its ways out—mirrors,
doors, windows, chrome surfaces, toilets. Silently, they add to the
ghost of extreme worry that presides over this entire intelligent
show.
Jim Riswold: Make-Believe Artist
G. Gibson Gallery
Through Aug 16.
WHEREAS, the Portland artist Jim Riswold was recently revealed to be
on Tacoma Art Museum’s short list for its next biennial, and WHEREAS,
Riswold has had not one, but two solo gallery shows in Seattle in the
last year, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that I will now bring my personal
hammer down on this artist.
Riswold makes big, glossy, colorful photographs that reach for
satire but amount to little more than low-calorie artistic cannibalism.
His current show at G. Gibson Gallery attempts to skewer the art
world’s cult of personalities and money hunger by skewering artists
who’ve done that already, like Warhol, Koons, and Hirst. Riswold is by
no means the only artist picking on the remains of pop art’s meatiest
bone, but he must be made an example of. Selling shallow parodies of
artists who have parodied selling by selling profound parodies is
hereby no longer allowed.
SMS: A Collection of Multiples
Davidson Galleries
Through Sept 27.
Shit must stop! That was the rallying cry of the SMS
Collective. It is not apparent what the shit was, precisely, but the
year was 1968, when the world was full of ill-defined effluvia worth
getting worked up over.
In that year, the SMS Collective released six folders, each one
containing about 10 or 11 works of print art by various artists, in
editions of 2,000. Once this was over, the SMS Collective—which
comprised pretty much anyone who stopped by American surrealist William
Copley’s Lower East Side loft to make a print for the edition and
received the universal $100 compensation—ceased to exist.
The lasting results include (Davidson Galleries is breaking up one
full set and selling each print separately) a naked girl jumping out of
a Baby Ruth wrapper sculpture by Mel Ramos, a loop of tape you’re
instructed to listen to for as long as you can stand by Bruce Nauman, a
boat hat by Roy Lichtenstein, a record to spin by Marcel Duchamp, a
prescription for “conception control” by critic/dealer Julian Levy, a
Mylar model of a storefront by Christo, and plenty more affably
unprecious treasures by the still-influential artists of the day,
including Joseph Kosuth, Lee Lozano, Bruce Conner, James Lee Byars, Ray
Johnson, Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, Meret Oppenheim, H. C. Westermann,
and On Kawara.
Much of the art involves instructions. If you buy it, or if you
speak very, very kindly to a gallery assistant, you can play with
it.
MetaphorM
Suyama Space
Through Aug 22.
Exit the world of play, of puppetry, of any pageantry whatsoever,
and enter MetaphorM. It’s a series of hanging shapes that fill
up Suyama Space. Made of thin metal tubes, the shapes are like drawings
in the air. Punctuating the room are weights of various shapes, sizes,
and colors—a spectrum of scattered geometry—suspended from
systems of counterbalancing pulleys. On the walls, summer light reaches
in from the high windows and casts shadows of the metal shapes on the
walls. Video projections, also on the walls, manipulate the same metal
shapes, moving and changing them. The layering of images extends the
room into a purely imaginary zone.
The artists are Carolyn Healy (responsible for the sculptural
environment) and John Phillips (responsible for video and sound), and
they’ve created a reminder of how bracingly pleasurable abstraction can
be, how truly direct and modest, regardless of its modernist ties to
holiness and asceticism. The catapulting of lines into shapes, the
discovery of the relative weights of objects, the transparency of
mechanics and structures, the evasive behavior of light: All these
things are ends in themselves. It is, for a few minutes at least, as
though there is no world outside the gallery. 
