Pictures of Paper: "Fuji from the Sea of Satta, Gulf of Suruga, Number 23, after Hiroshige", 2009, digital c-print, 64 3/4 x 43 1/2 inches

So a critic walks into a gallery and looks at seven very large works ensconced in imposing frames. He sees multi-colored configurations of carefully cut fabric that in most cases looks like thin felt, and he notes that most of the configurations coalesce into simulations of familiar art historical images—one a Winslow Homer seascape, four others faithful to Ukiyo-e woodblock images by the likes of Hiroshige and Hokusai. Then he picks up the price list to read the titles of the works and realizes that all of the works in the exhibition are editioned digital C-prints executed on a stunningly grand scale.

He returns to the works and notes the subtle drop shadows around the shapes that he thought to be cut from colored cloth, and he still cannot see the digital artifice until he completes a prolonged close-range examination. Minutes earlier, he would have sworn upon a tall stack of holy books that the work was made of collaged fabric and colored paper, but now he worries that too many years of looking at art has taken a toll on his eyesight. But he still very much enjoyed looking at the work.

This short summary captures the experiential essence of Vik Muniz’s current exhibition at the Rena Bransten gallery. It offers a stunning demonstration that the difference between any real thing and its simulated cousin may indeed be a moot point, simply because the technics of simulation are now fully capable of outstripping the most inquisitive of human eyes, and perhaps the entire human sensorium as well. The only question that remains is how we might continue to go about enjoying esthetic experiences that we can no longer trust, with Plato’s stern admonishments on that subject suddenly seeming to be quaint exercises in an outmoded moralism.

The works in Muniz’s exhibition signal this in a number of ways. For example, his reworking of the Ukiyo-e images remind us that the term literally translates as “floating world,” and the world of images has never floated more than in our current regime of technological reproducibility. We are also reminded of the influence that such works had on the work of early modern masters such as Van Gogh and Gauguin, leading us to ponder the many ways that our brave new world of technologically assisted image phantoms may have been a latent ghost imbedded within the modernist project.

Pictures of paper: "Fudo Falls, Oji, after Hiroshige", 2009, digital c-print, 64 3/4 x 43 1/2 inches; Pictures of Paper: "Vase of Flowers with Pocket Watch, after Willen Van Aelst", 2010, digital c-print, 56 x 40 inches

But the exhibition contains another work that points us in a different direction. It is titled Pictures of Paper (color): Vase of Flowers with Pocket Watch after Willem Van Aelst (all of the works in the series are called “Pictures of Paper [color]”). Using the same technique as is evidenced in the other works, it is a reproduction of a reproduction of a Vanitas still-life by the famous 17^th century Dutch master, which is to say that it references a different kind of floating world, one where the bounty of life flourishes but for a fleeting moment before its runs out of the precious time allotted to it by fate. Despite the fact that, in visual terms, this is the richest of all the works in the exhibition, it is also the one that most clearly intimates an oblique and disquieting connection with the morality of mortality.

Pictures of Paper: "Northeaster, after Winslow Homer", 2010, digital c-print, 40 x 59 inches

With the single exception of the above-mentioned still-life image, the rest of Muniz’s new works suggest that it would be better if we would greet the circus of appearances with a smile of happy confidence in the brave new world’s capabilities for providing visual enjoyment-as-simple-enjoyment, because the world of original meaning has been lost to artistic hands. But maybe not to the literary mind. Two books come to mind. The first is a large catalog raisonné of Muniz’s works recently edited by Pedro Correa de Lago and published by Capivara Press, within which is chronicled every detail of the artist’s three decades of using unconventional materials to joust with various art historical assumptions, and another somewhat older book titled Reflex: a Vik Muniz Primer, that being a semi-autobiographical, semi-philosophical and fully humorous exercise in artistic self-explanation—possibly the best “artist’s statement” to have been written since the time of Benvenuto Cellini’s famous autobiography.

–MARK VAN PROYEN

Vik Muniz: Pictures on Paper (color) @ Rena Bransten Gallery through October 23, 2010.

Candida Höfer, "Palacio Peredo-Barreda de Caja Cantabria Santillana del Mar I” (2004), C-print, 73 x 89"

Contrary to what one might expect from a show titled "Decline and Fall", this is not an exhibition about the demise of the American Dream — or about anything else that’s in the news.  This show skirts topicality almost completely and focuses instead on the meltdown and transformation of the hierarchies that surround us.  Modes of artistic expression, interpretations of history, shifting gender roles, the dissolution of middle-class values and vanities, linguistic incoherence and the fact of our own corporeal demise are among the topics addressed by the 12 artists assembled here by gallery co-director Jenny Baie.  [A short Q&A with Ms. Baie follows this review.]

Key among the those charting such transformations is Candida Höfer.  For years, her super-sized images of public spaces have commanded rapt attention. She, along with her counterparts in the Dusseldorf School of Photography, helped rehabilitate the once-discredited idea of photographic veracity with hyperreal images of stunning clarity  Still, I have never been able to shake the feeling that Hofer siphons all the oxygen out a room before taking a picture. And it’s precisely that leaden quality that makes her appearance in “Decline and Fall” feel so right.  The picture on view here, “Palacio Peredo-Barreda de Caja Cantabria Santillana del Mar I” (2004), shows the interior of a once-grand palace that is now a bit down at the heels. It’s a pliable mascot of sorts, one whose tarnished grandeur functions as a symbol for the demise of practically every established order you can think of.

In addition to Höfer, the show includes Doug Hall, Martin Klimas, Ian McDonald, Andrew Moore, Vik Muniz, Joseph Park, Deborah Oropallo, Marci Washington, John Waters, Fred Wilson and Bing Wright. Appropriately, it leans heavily toward photography and on photo-based hybrids.

Vik Muniz, “Gordian Puzzles: The Tower of Babel, after Pieter Breugel” (2007), C-print, 75 x 98"

The most notable of these is Vik Muniz whose “Gordian Puzzles: The Tower of Babel, after Pieter Breugel” (2007) transforms the Dutch artist’s 1563 painting, of a crumbling citadel, into a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were conjoined in a fractured, three-dimensional collage and then photographed. The resulting image is as confounding as the knot that Alexander the Great is said to have cut in one fell swoop. But the Gordian conundrum, if I read Muniz correctly, is far simpler than anything we face today; we are as deafened by the din of our own bickering as we were in Biblical times. 

Martin Klimas, "Untitled", (2003), color photo, 43 x 66"

Fred Wilson, Untitled Bust, 1992-2000, mixed media, 8 3/4 x 9 x 5 1/2"; Deborah Oropallo, "Repunzel," 2008, digital pigment print, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 26"

The two paintings here, "Maid with Squirrel" (2008) and “Repunzel” (2008), both from her "Feign" series, are somewhat less complex, but just as psychologically loaded. Based on downloaded images of models, they are digitally manipulated and then ouput as paint on canvas. They are, if nothing else, magnificently decadent, as the "heroin-chic" affection of "Repunzel" attests. 

John Waters, "60th Birthday", 2006, C-print, 25.5 x 20.5"

Film director/photographer John Waters, the high priest of high camp (and as of late, a marquee name on Broadway), frames the concept of decline and fall in personal terms: in a gruesomely altered film still of a woman whose sagging face and wrinkled hands look like something Joel Peter Witkin might have created had he gotten hold of Joan Crawford in her role in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”. Waters used the picture to commemorate his 60^th birthday in 2006.

Just as creepy is Marci Washington’s high-Goth painting “To Walk These Halls – Unnamed and Unmourned” (2009). With a disintegrating skeleton set against patterned wallpaper, it warns (according to the artist) that our repression of history is akin to a skeleton in the closet. The Freudian part rings true, but the picture is too simplistic to carry the idea.  By contrast, culture warrior Fred Wilson’s attempt to Africanize the Euro-centric view of art history – by inserting an Egyptian figurine into a Greek bust – is as clever as it is subversive. But one wonders how it wound up next to the over-aestheticized Hallmark sentiment conveyed in Bing Howard’s photo of fallen rose petals.  

Decline and Fall” casts a wide net. That it pulls in everything but topical news is a decisive victory for a concept that is as wide-open as the unwritten history of our times.

Q&A with Curator/Co-Director Jenny Baie

Deborah Oropallo, Maid with Squirrel, 2008, digital pigment print, acrylic on canvas 30 x 29"

Andrew Moore, Peter the Great and BMW (Old Sculptor’s Studio), 2001, C-print, 30 x 40"

Joseph Park, Leave it on the Dance Floor, 2008, oil on panel, 24 x 18"