JOSE PARLA

Recent showing of: ‘Walls, Diaries, Paintings'

Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery

Jose Parla, a Cuban-American artist grew up in 1980’s Miami in the midst of its cocaine era, and during graffiti art’s debut as a cutting edge form of artistic expression. Since then, he has combined his street art aesthetic with his formal arts education and earned critical success by bringing his wall installations and paintings in to the white cube environment. Among many other venues, Parla has exhibited at Emmanuel Perrotin gallery in Paris as well as with Deitch Projects in NYC and has been featured and discussed by major art critics and publications. After viewing his impressive resume, I continue to be surprised by how easy it seems for artists to capitalize upon established visual and narrative tropes. While visiting the Chelsea galleries in NYC this past March, I found Parla to be a manifestation of what is problematic of the commercial art scene in NY in general: that there is a rigid fixation on the old guard and a predictable repertoire of work. In short, among many of the reputable galleries in one of the world’s most central commercial art spots, there seems to be very little that is actually new or risk taking in the Chelsea galleries. My impression in many of the galleries was, what sells is what shows and that what shows often utilizes established aesthetics while espousing played out or over emphasized critical themes. Whereas Parla’s success seems to rely on the appeal and popularity of the street art aesthetic, Mike Weiss Gallery’s recent Hermann Nitsch exhibit featured safe, colorful, and fun-loving performances (the remnants of which were for sale in the gallery) while relying on the capital of the artist’s former infamy and affiliation with the Viennese Actionists.

Walking down West 24th Street Jose Parla’s work was visible through the gallery windows across the street and was immediately captivating. Parla’s work points to the city surfaces as a billboard- journaling accumulative experiences. He resites this urban experience and imbues it with his own layer of palimpsetic code within a context where every thing exists because a decision was made, and therefore has an automatic air of meaning: a gallery. Parla mimics aesthetics of abstract expressionist gestural calligraphic mark making with Dada-esque inclusions of flyers and posters found on the street, on backgrounds that could easily be, and sometimes really are, graffiti covered walls. In combining these three trends, Parla clearly shows his predilection for the idea of texts meaning versus its actual meaning- opening the work up to reflecting the viewers personal narratives and associations of urban environments. Parla treats text in a manner similar to the Cubist and Dada artists whose fixation arose out of the mass production of newspapers and advertisements and the ensuing everpresence of words in the public visual milieu. Typography contributes to the visual experience of Parla’s art work, a formal and compositional device, they are spatial figures drawing attention to the textuality of text and suggesting the potential textuality of the other, non textual Twombly-esque marks in the work.


There is a simultaneous escapism and familiarity appealing in Parla’s work which becomes, a carnival of the evidence/impersonations of contemporary life and the sexy side of urban grit. Clear but textually indecipherable representations of daily urban experience make the work accessible, giving it impressions of layers of content, meaning, and human presence while at the same time that they absolve the viewer of the responsibility of really decoding the works meaning, making it a sensorial, what Parla terms, “reading through feeling” experience.

Perhaps there is a cynical assumption of insincerity that underwrites quotidian work presented in a white cube environment. And so, maybe the fact that Parla is one of the grandfathers of the street art movement is historically important in establishing that he was at least at one time sincere. However is there not a certain falseness to work which talks about everyday experience when it represents the everyday experience of that artist a long time ago? How long ago did he develop this idea and how many times has he repeated it since that ideas inception? The combination of these tastes which are so everpresent, from Urban Outfitters graffiti art appeal to the fact that Twombly’s can be found in most museums of modern art, and the fact that Parla’s work has not changed significantly since he became popular, makes me doubt the sincerity of his work as little more than him riding the wave that he helped create.

Interview with Jose Parla:

1-2-1 w/jeffstaple feat. Jose Parla from jeffstaple on Vimeo.

-CAT UTHASOONTHORN

‘Gedi Sibony - The Deception of Context’

exhibit:

‘ALL OF THIS AND NOTHING’

Hammer Museum

January 30 - April 24, 2011

Gedi Sibony’s unconventional sculptures, exhibited as part of the Hammer Museum’s, ‘All of this and Nothing’ show, compel the viewer to tow the line of what can be thought of as an art object. Though much contemporary art presents this same challenge, Sibony’s pieces have a sincerity in their origins, and tactility in their materials, that seems at the same time universally, and surprisingly, appealing.

Gedi Sibony

The Predicament (what it is that ceases)

2009

Sibony’s sculptures often consist of found, salvaged, and recontextualized objects which were in their former lives, discarded, unfinished, or incidental. Site-specificity is at the heart of understanding Sibony’s works as, given the familiarity of the objects he chooses, placement in white-cube environments becomes a catalyst for their reconsideration. Sibony’s work is about the experience of living in the world, about ‘when’ and ‘how to’ look at things. Much of his inspiration derives from the things he lives around which is why objects in his studio often become the subjects of/or literally become, his pieces (as is the case with both pieces in this entry). Dominic Molon, Chief Curator at the St. Louis Contemporary, notes how Sibony’s work derives from his experience of “living in the world,” suggesting that “it’s almost as if the art finds the artist, rather than the other way around.”

Sibony reinvests in mundane materials such as cardboard, packing materials, walls removed from his studio, a tarp draped over an easel which accidentally embodied his dream of a floating sculpture, and breathes in to them a new aesthetic life, a new identity in a new home, and hence a brand new reception. The artist is occupied by the notion of waste - both that of discarding perfectly good materials and also the energy spent in remaking and replacing the discarded. As with ‘The Cutters, 2010’, a wall removed from his studio, and his other smaller pieces at the Hammer which were the backsides of frames and drawings salvaged from yard-sales, Sibony seems not only to reclaim objects but to draw attention to their traces of history, and respective roles within what Molon calls, “the industrial food chain.”

Gedi Sibony

The Cutters

2010

The success of Sibony’s work relies heavily on how it occupies space. The placement of his pieces creates a balance with the architecture of the gallery that is both graceful and uncanny. There is a surreal inappropriateness to such rough objects at once alluding to landscapes, or the passage of time, while, evoking an emotional recognition that things so commonplace, so incidental, so unfinished -gone just slightly awry- can all of a sudden be beautiful, and oddly consoling.

Trash to Monument.

Sibony’s sculptures also challenge the convention of the ready-made by simply presenting unmodified, prexisting objects in a new context. From everyday context to art context, Sibony shifts their conceptual context from discarded or incidental, to intentional. With respects to his trash objects, Sibony transforms something that was formerly a liability in to something precious. He takes something that is a material, financial, spatial, and environmental burden to society - something that has to be processed as waste- and not only recirculates it back in to society, but hails it as monumental and important.

Deception of context

There is a magic of balance and transformation that happens with Sibony’s work at the same time that there is a nagging sense of the absurdity of what we will consider seriously when asked. This seems to beg the question of what is not worthy of our deeper considerations. What is it exactly that makes this work interesting? Is it the consistency of his message? The romance of it? Our realization that we agree with Sibony? Or just the social pressure to agree created by these objects placement in an intellectual space?

Finally, there is a humor in being asked to consider the unimportant as monumental. Sibony’s pieces are thoughtful, simple, and austere enough to command consideration, to know that you aren’t having a joke played on you, but with the simultaneous understanding that you are considering a nicely placed piece of trash, or at the most, some utilitarian commonplace object. What makes Sibony’s work so successful to me is that sometimes its only distinguishing characteristic from something leaning against a dumpster, or sitting in an empty storefront, is his level of intention and the consideration that this intention and consistency compels in his viewers.

CLICK HERE: Gedi Sibony talking about sculpture

CLICK HERE: Interview with Dominic Molon, Chief Curator at St. Louis Contemporary Museum of Art

- CAT U-THASOONTHORN