Bruce LaBruce
PERES PROJECTS BERLIN
Schlesische Strasse 26
January 30–April 24
Bruce LaBruce, LA ZOMBIE, 2010, still from a color film in HD, 65 minutes. Installation view.
Francois Sagat, the star of Bruce LaBruce’s latest film and a series of monochromatic silk-screened portraits in his exhibition “LA ZOMBIE: The film that would not die,” has a gladiator physique and tattooed scalp that on first glance seem at odds with the usual flesh eater’s starved silhouette. But the French-Arab gay porn star’s sensitive face sets him apart from his role as the unseeing zombie obsessed with satiating unquenchable desires.
In the director’s sixty-five-minute film, LA ZOMBIE, 2010, Sagat appears as both an uncommonly comely homeless man scavenging for trash and an electric-blue zombie who finds murdered men and then penetrates their wounds with his massive pointed penis. After he ejaculates blood, the men are resurrected as fellow zombies. The young man who picks him up hitchhiking in the opening scene and whose heart he pumps after a fatal car crash sits on the wreckage lovingly and mournfully watching Sagat dress himself to leave him. The moment establishes Sagat as a romantic character, akin to the melancholy vampire rather than the amoral and greedy zombies who typically inhabit the genre.
By transforming Sagat into a mutant of his genre, LaBruce humanizes the actor and creates an odd but compellingly optimistic view of mankind. Those familiar with George A. Romero’s films will be particularly aware that we might be in the throes of a zombie society that mindlessly devours everything in sight. Even our appetite for Twilight and other vampire-themed pop is evidence of rampant consumer lust. But Sagat’s sensitive zombie seems to possess greater depth and existential self-awareness, more even than the mortal businessman whose dead body he defiles.
— Ana Finel Honigman
George Condo
SPRÜTH MAGERS BERLIN
Oranienburger Str. 18
January 30–April 1
George Condo, The Fallen Butler, 2009, oil on linen, 78 x 76".
You could almost say that George Condo has two solo shows going on at once in “Family Portrait,” his current exhibition in Berlin. On the surface, at least, the two series of paintings each seems created by a different artist. In the smaller first room hang four somber single portraits of strange, characteristically Condo-esque creatures against night-blue backgrounds. It’s all a bit Where the Wild Things Are gone awry: strange beasts with enormous jaw structures that double as necks, heads twisted like balloon sculptures into mutated shapes, each assigned the same stock of red hair and thus belonging to the same “family”—united by their freakishness.
In the second room, the paintings are larger, messier—yet also highly formal in their composition, despite the expressionist gadgetry employed (such as Twomblyesque crayon scrawls and cartoon graffiti faces à la Basquiat). Here, the figures are distorted and scrambled beyond recognition, grouped together in the center of the canvas as though posing for a family portrait. The most successful of these happens to be the messiest: The Fallen Butler, 2009, wherein Condo lets his palette guide him through a virtuoso performance of whites, pinks, greens, yellows, purples, and blacks. Yet another three paintings, again single portraits, seem to serve as “remixes” of those seen in the first room, with a quasi-Cubistic distortion of the figures’ facial features essentially reducing them to all eyes and teeth. But a fourth, untitled painting is the real freak here, owing to its comparative restraint. Its gray-outlined figures copulate maniacally against a pink background—yet another testament to the artist’s inspired elasticity.
— Travis Jeppesen
“Conversation Pieces: A Chamber Play”
JOHNEN GALERIE
Marienstrasse 10
January 9–April 17
Rodney Graham, Fantasia for Four Hands, 2002, two color photographs, each 102 3/8 x 72".
Before the recent onslaught of curatorial-studies programs, curators were typically educated in art history, literature, or––as in the case of Jens Hoffmann––theater. Drawing on Hoffmann’s biography and his thoughtful, self-conscious approach to exhibitions, “Conversation Pieces” is a three-part show modeled on the structure of a chamber play and divided into “Acts,” each of which presents works by six artists, which are distributed into pairs and exhibited in three different rooms, or “Scenes.”
“Scene One” of “Act One,” which is on view until February 6, couples Tim Lee with Hans-Peter Feldmann in a dialogue between Lee’s photographic reenactment of the supine, pathos-filled pose with which Neil Young began every concert on his 1978 concert tour (Rust Never Sleeps, Neil Young, 1979, 2010) and Feldmann’s appropriation and restaging of ordinary objects in two witty but slightly melancholic sculptures: Robert, 2003, and Eiereimer auf Stuhl mit Pappsockel (Bucket Filled with Eggs on a Chair on a Cardboard Base), 2003. In “Scene Two,” four identical versions of Rodney Graham, playing the part of piano virtuoso, perform in a diptych titled Fantasia for Four Hands, 2002, while the three desynchronized metronomes that compose Martin Creed’s Work No. 223, 1999, fail to provide a consistent tempo for a genre (the fantasia) that by definition is improvisational and doesn’t require one anyway. This room also includes a selection of artifacts from chamber-play performances at the Deutsches Theater, including a poster from Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkmann, the first play Hoffmann attended as a young student in Berlin. The final room, “Scene Three,” is organized around Anri Sala’s Agassi, 2006, a still projection of the tennis player as his eyes just miss an oncoming ball. Across the space, a curious group of spectators snarl, cringe, and even drool as they peer out from a selection of Roger Ballen’s weird and beautiful black-and-white portraits of rural inhabitants in South Africa, in what is perhaps the most unpredictable and refreshing inclusion in the show. If it’s true that “the second act is always the best,” there are surely more clever conceptual antics to come.
“Act Two” of this exhibition opens February 13, with “Act Three” premiering March 20.