Sara
Krulwich/The New York Times | | | | It
was all going according to plan for Jon Kessler, which is to say, without any
final plan at all. Just weeks before his deadline, the artist was working frantically,
searching his imagination with "exuberance and terror," as he put it, to prepare
the enormous show of his work that opens on Oct. 30 at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art
Center, titled "The Palace at 4 A.M." That
title, chosen by the artist, originally belonged to a 1932 sculpture by Alberto
Giacometti: a miniature Surrealist stage set of ghostly stillness and preternaturally
slender proportions. Mr. Kessler's "Palace" couldn't be farther from that. His
hurly-burly of a show features an installation of nearly 40 bolted and welded
kinetic sculptures, a factory of clanking and gyrating machines fitted with motors
and surveillance cameras that can capture live scenes of the audience mixed with
news clips and other media imagery. This bounty is displayed on more than 300
monitors.
| Sara
Krulwich/The New York Times | | | So
what does his work have to do with Giacometti's? "It's the title that struck me,
with its sense of quiet and dream," said Mr. Kessler, 48, chatting in his Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, studio a few weeks before the exhibition. He is at once earnest and
relaxed, dressed for work in jeans and a black T-shirt. "But it was also the idea
of the wildness of dreams. The whole show, and the work I've done since 9/11,
really start with the sense of the pure - or maybe I should say impure - insanity
of the world in the past four years." The
war in Iraq was under way when he began working on the pieces, he said. "I was
looking at all these pictures of the ruins of Saddam's palaces, and that's the
dream gone violently crazy that Giacometti's title first tapped for me," he said.
"It sent me spinning off into the rage of the work." On
a recent visit to Mr. Kessler's long, narrow studio, a former industrial space
that he has worked in since he first rented it in 1980, the sources for his rage
were apparent everywhere. His
part-time assistant, Isabelle Woodley, was at a computer manipulating news images
downloaded from the Internet or taken from the videos of the Iraq war that will
occupy the various monitors throughout the show. Pictures of President Bush, soldiers
and the destruction in Iraq competed for a viewer's gaze with cutouts of glamorous
models, a billboard-size pornographic shot of a woman with her legs spread (the
crotch to be replaced in the exhibition space by a yawning doorway), and images
of a glorious, acid-orange sunset and a gas-slurping Hummer - each evoking for
the artist beauty, terror and decadent consumerism. It
was early May when Alanna Heiss, director of P.S. 1 and the curator of Mr. Kessler's
show, offered him an exhibition. He first considered what he called a "termite
mound," a sprawling heap of a hundred monitors rising up in the gallery, but he
decided it might look too much like a nightclub in Berlin - or Niketown. Then
he thought of the chaotic war in Iraq and the fragmentation of America's media-driven
culture, and settled on a way to capture this contemporary bedlam. He imagined
rooms populated by his kinetic sculptures and monitors firing off continual rounds
of images, many of them from surveillance cameras that he likened to snipers picking
off the spectators as they moved from gallery to gallery. Mr.
Kessler worked on the show through the spring and summer. He flew in Martin Basher,
a former assistant, from Wellington, New Zealand. Mr. Basher stayed for a month,
cutting scores of aluminum sheets and drilling hundreds of holes for Mr. Kessler's
contraptions while the artist welded and used his favorite tool, purchased on
eBay - a South Bend-brand lathe with a date on it: April 14, 1943. "It
was probably made for making small-bore gun barrels during World War II," the
artist said. "I love the irony of making this show, of all shows, on it. But beyond
the irony, the roughness of the industrial process - the welds and milling and
all the bolts and wires left exposed - feels right." The
art that brought Mr. Kessler his initial success in the 1980's was far more refined
in appearance. The sculptures incorporated moving parts, but they were elegant
and formal, without anything akin to the charged political content of his new
creations. "You
spend all your time polishing metal," he said of his earlier work. "That refinement
is like a trap, and it sends the viewers' eyes to the wrong place and breaks trust
with them, with a sense of authenticity. This new show is about exposing mechanisms
- of the sculptures, and of our culture now. I wanted this taped-together quality." Some
weeks before the opening, Ms. Heiss stopped by the studio one day to go over details.
She had visited on and off throughout the summer, making the trip by car service
from P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Queens, and now she could see the work begin
to approach its final form. They walked through the lingering warmth of late September
to a cafe across the street, where they talked about the art's emotional heat. "The
importance of doing the show isn't about its anger, though that anger is there,"
Ms. Heiss said. "It's that people can enter into the turmoil of the work and make
something meaningful for themselves - because these media images are so charged,
so much about all of our recent histories. And so the show is about the way that
history is made for us by the media, but also about what we each make for ourselves
of that history." Mr.
Kessler agreed. "I'm asking people to investigate the source of the work, and
that could be about something else, about looking at the sources of where we get
our information from," he said. He
added, "It's about taking back these media images, getting away from the suspension
of disbelief - that you know you're being fooled, but you agree to be part of
that process." He
said his ideas were informed by the French intellectual Paul Virilio's fiercely
polemical books on modern conflict: "Pure War," "Speed & Politics" and "Ground
Zero." Yet
conflict is not the lasting impression he wants to make on his audience, Mr. Kessler
remarked recently in his studio. "I don't think these pieces are finally about
the terror of violence," he said. "They get transformed by motion, by the pumped-up
colors, by the quick mix of images constantly in play. I don't know if the work
is redemptive, but transformation is the word that's important." Transformation
is a concept with powerful resonance for the artist. Having achieved critical
and financial success in the 1980's, he found his career stalled in the 90's.
He struggled to find new ways to move his art forward. In 2000, he left his New
York gallery of 16 years, Luhring Augustine; his work with galleries in Germany
and France subsequently fell away as well. He
set out in a variety of directions. He helped found a now-defunct toy company
called Bozart. He began teaching at Columbia University's School of the Arts and
became the chairman of its visual arts program. But his art flagged. It
wasn't until 2004, after more than half a dozen fruitless visits from other art
dealers, that Jeffrey Deitch offered him a show - the well-reviewed "Global Village
Idiot." It brought him back from what he saw as the eclipse of his career into
what he called, with a mix of amusement and trepidation, his second act, a reference
to F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous remark, "There are no second acts in American
lives." On
a recent afternoon, Mr. Kessler stood in his studio in front of "Modern Vision,"
a central piece in the P.S. 1 show that is all about the second act. It was conceived
originally as a repeating eight-second simulation of a smart bomb that flies in
through the facade of the freshly reopened Museum of Modern Art, finds a Lilliputian
copy of this very same piece, "Modern Vision," and detonates. He
and Douglas Repetto, an artist and Columbia colleague who has programmed the timing
of the sculpture's six motors and two surveillance cameras, had just paused for
a break after three hours of tiny calibrations.
"When I first
showed this to Alanna," Mr. Kessler said, "she said that flying a smart bomb into
MoMA isn't exactly an image that made the museum happy. And I said that wasn't
what it's really about. It's about a kind of solipsism - about my work finally
making it into MoMA and then getting destroyed. It's a totally self-conscious
sculpture trying to affirm its own existence." Glenn
D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, sees Mr. Kessler's new work as
part of a well-established continuum of kinetic art. "Duchamp fits into this tradition
early on - or Yves Tinguely," Mr. Lowry said. "It's a fascination with machines
that extends across the century, but Jon uses the latest technology to critique
its ability to be all that meaningful." "By
and large this works," he said. "You see the trick, you understand the game, yet
the images are seductive." Mr.
Kessler is taking no chances with his second go at success. Rather than waiting
for a gallery to court him, he invited curators, collectors and critics to visit
his studio during the run-up to the show. Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, the
curators for the next Whitney Biennial, paid a call. So did Kerry Brougher, chief
curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. Wandering
amid the carnival of whirring sculptures, Mr. Brougher said the scene was "like
a film turned inside out, blurring reality and fiction." Two
weeks before the opening, as his work was arriving from the studio, Mr. Kessler
stood in the big third-floor gallery at P.S. 1, contemplating the 20-foot ceiling,
as if an answer were hanging there. "I'm just starting to play, adding a camera
here, taking out a monitor there," he said. "I'm finding the final rhythm. I think
it's fair to say that I'll be inventing until the night before the show." Installers
were placing mirrors along the top and sides of a towering stack of 49 monitors
that are part of a work called "Theater of Ideas." Gazing into the mirrors, the
viewer takes in what seems to be an infinite recession of kaleidoscopic images
- splattered blood, a doll with a dunce cap evoking an Abu Ghraib captive, stylized
Kabuki figures. Everything seems to be spinning in Mr. Kessler's world. Original
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