Michal Helfman: Give/Get (detail), 2015, inlaid wood, shell, woven plastic, metal stand, two 3-D-printed dice, dimensions variable; at K.
The Videofreex and their “Media Buses” at Maple Tree Farm, Lanesville, N.Y., n.d., chromogenic color print. Courtesy Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art.
MICHAL HELFMAN K.
For her first solo show in New York, Israeli artist Michal Helfman presented a taut display that included drawing, installation, a dice game and a video. “I’m so broke I can’t pay attention” was the penultimate in a series of six quick-fire exhibitions addressing contemporary value systems (for which the downtown gallery P! temporarily rebranded itself as K.). Passersby were misled by CHANGE (2013), an illuminated green sign in the window mimicking that of a currency exchange. Inside, a number of visitors asked to change money at a service window before discovering the ruse. Surprise, one might say, is a form of creative currency. Helfman’s regard for staging and interaction dates to the time she spent working at a nightclub. To the right of the service window, heavy strings of metal piping, ceramic beads, small plastic skulls and shells veiled the doorway into the gallery. This barrier, smartly titled Certain, both generated discomfort and focused one’s attention. After the clanking awkwardness of getting past it, entering the show’s main space felt relatively free. An anthropomorphic metal sculpture, Attention (2015), pinned a bundle of dollar bills under one “foot” while the “arms” held an elastic band taut, as if ready to shoot it through a hole in the service window. This impish piece characterized the show’s light-hearted, slightly peculiar atmosphere. Two works were particularly potent. The acrylic-andoil-pastel drawing One Dollar (2013) portrays the pyramid vignette printed on one-dollar bills. In Helfman’s rendition, perspective has shifted. The pyramid is seen in three-quarter view, while the Eye of Providence looks askance. The ribbon flanking the pyramid bears a faint, demonic visage, and the now-lurid green vegetation, overgrown and seething, looks like the sea. Paradoxically, Helfman’s alterations show that none are needed to demonstrate the ghoulish character of a symbol passed daily from hand to hand. A low dicing table with two stools stood in front of the drawing; the type of woven plastic used on the stools also cov152
September 2015
ered part of the gallery wall, as if to continue the scenario. The installation, titled Give/Get (2015), includes a pair of dice with words, not pips, on them: We, Will, For, Get, Give and Not. An accompanying document lists the possible combinations and suggests meanings for them (as in, “For–Give: I cannot forgive that art will sleep in the bed that was made for it”). Riding a narrative of sociopolitical worth, the dice were 3-D-printed at the artist’s request on a machine smuggled into Syria by a humanitarian worker to make prosthetic devices. “I’m so broke I can’t pay attention” contradicted the poverty of its title. In the video % (2014), dancers move in a line, breaking into formations but always falling into a collective forward step; in the show, the works likewise inserted themselves into streams of value and skirted them by turns. This waltz of engagement was astute and never earnest. Helfman conjured a lightness of being that shielded the subject matter—money, exchange, symbolism, economies of attention and care—from judgment or consequence. What remained was a stimulating reflection on contemporary value, with artworks as its conduits. —Iona Whittaker
NEW PALTZ, N.Y.
“VIDEOFREEX: THE ART OF GUERrILLA TELEVISION” Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
“Videofreex: The Art of Guerrilla Television,” at SUNY New Paltz’s Dorsky Museum, explored the activities of a ’70s-era New York-based video collective whose members straddled a range of methodologies but were united by a singular enthusiasm. As wide-eyed innovators of a new medium, they saw video technology as a means of transforming passive viewers into active mediators. Since 2000, Video Data Bank, an organization
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committed to preserving video and media art, has restored hundreds of the thousands of rarely or never before seen Freex works—a cache that made possible not only the Dorsky exhibition but also a 2015 documentary film, Here Come the Videofreex! The Videofreex collective was founded in 1969, on the heels of the Woodstock music festival, where artist David Cort met would-be journalist Parry Teasdale. Novice CBS producer Don West tapped Cort, Teasdale and Mary “Curtis” Ratcliff (Cort’s partner) to produce a primetime vérité program on ’60s counterculture. In December 1969, the collective—which by then had grown to include members of the CBS production crew—presented the resultant work, titled Subject to Change, to network executives. With effects that would much later become hallmarks of music television, the 90-minute program consisted of gauzy footage of electronic music festivals, alternative schools, political rallies, and rock-and-roll radio stations, as well as close-up off-thecuff interviews. More of a Happening than a screening, the program’s presentation took place in the group’s Prince Street loft, accompanied by live music. The executives walked out; Don West was fired. Subject to Change never aired, and the Freex, including those then employed by CBS, cut all ties with corporate television. Independent curator Andrew Ingall’s thematically arranged exhibition—which, in addition to Freex videos, included ephemera, photographs, drawings, prints and publications—opened with excerpts of Subject to Change. Nearby monitors showed footage, left out of the original program, of interviews with activists Abbie Hoffman and Fred Hampton. The exhibition section “Art Scene and Art Seen” situated the 10-member collective within a larger artistic community concerned with capabilities, such as instantaneous playback, that distinguished video from celluloid film. Artists in this community included Nam June Paik and Joan Jonas and collectives like Raindance and Global Village. While in residence at WNET’s TV Lab, Cort produced an interactive closed-circuit video installation, with composite and mirror effects through which he and fellow Freex Skip Blumberg, Bart Friedman and Ann Woodward created video and photographic works reminiscent of images generated in the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. The Dorsky exhibition featured archival documentation of this project—including its showing in a 1974 exhibition at The Kitchen, “Explorations in the Videospace by David Cort and His Friends”—as well as some of the works Cort and Woodward made using the installation’s technology. In one of Woodward’s photographs, a pair of oversize red lips hovers atop a hairy torso. It is a strong graphic image as well as a potent artifact of the artists’ collaborative process. At the center of the exhibition, a large map on the wall traced the routes the Freex traveled on their “Media Buses” throughout New York State in their quest to disseminate video equipment and technical know-how to more people. From 1971 until the Freex disbanded in 1978, however, the heart of their activities was Maple Tree Farm in Lanesville, N.Y., where video artists from around the world visited them. The exhibition
gave merely a taste of the 258 shows the Freex produced for their pirate television station (the first in the U.S.), Lanesville TV. Some programs on the station focused on local news, while others were send-ups of network television or more unorthodox artistic programming. But whether drawn to citizen journalism, satire or formal experimentation, the Videofreex seem to have agreed on one point: the most interesting aspect of video is its capacity to allow everyone to take part. —Erin Sickler
Elaine Lustig Cohen: Centered Rhyme, 1967, acrylic on canvas, 60 inches square; at the Glass House.
NEW CANAAN, CONN.
ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN Glass House
ON VIEW THROUGH SEPT. 28 It is more than likely that you have seen Elaine Lustig Cohen’s designs for buildings, interiors, books or exhibitions. Stopping on a street corner, you might have lingered over a stack of New Directions paperbacks whose California-hued Constructivist covers caught your eye. If you have studied Minimalism, you might recall the image of a vivid red line snaking through a large P on the cover of the Jewish Museum’s 1966 “Primary Structures” catalogue. Strolling through Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson’s Seagram Building, you might have noticed the blunt font used on the signage. These are just a few of the projects Cohen realized within the two decades of her design career. Cohen collaborated with Johnson for almost a decade and is now the subject of an exhibition at his Glass House. Rather than illustrate the obvious, the show celebrates a lesser-known part of Cohen’s creative activities—her dynamic geometric abstractions on canvas. Nine of these paintings, made between 1966 and 1976, are on view.
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