Parkett 89:
Mark Bradford, Oscar Tuazon,
Charline von Heyl, and Haegue Yang
For more details on Parkett 89 content and artists’ editions, subscriptions and back issues, and to connect on facebook please go to www.parkettart.com.
The new Parkett takes its readers up front and close to its collaborating artists Mark Bradford, Oscar Tuazon, Charline von Heyl, and Haegue Yang. Each artist has also made a limited edition especially for Parkett. Additional texts in this Parkett: Daniel Schwartz by William A. Ewing; Mona Hatoum by Jacqueline Burckhardt; and a conversation on sound in art between Kabir Carter and Alan Lich.Christopher Bedford of the Wexner Center explores Mark Bradford‘s “shimmering grids,” that to him evoke the live news footage shot by ominous helicopters hovering over Los Angeles. Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan elaborates on Bradford’s assorted paper trail revealing a frantic ethos of pest control, cheap divorce, prison phone services, money wires and credit lines. Bradford employs his unmistakable technique of collage and de-collage to confront and expose issues of what the art historian Huey Copland calls “the socially dead,” and “politically, disenfranchised”—but with an inspiring force that makes us stop and take note. In his edition for Parkett, THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, Bradford retells the ancient legend of King Arthur by submerging a switchblade rather than a sword in a solid rock.
Encountering one of Oscar Tuazon‘s large concrete pavilions is like coming across a half completed abandoned construction site years after the fact. But this frozen moment is intended to exhibit a realism of failure and obsolescence. Tuazon’s ambitious structures never quite arrive at a finished state and never quite state their purpose. To Kunsthalle Bern’s director Phillipe Pirotte they evoke a sci-fi dystopia or the doomed efforts of the 1960s. Eileen Myles envisions a sexualized Tuazon “bursting through walls humming a silly song”. Commiserating with fellow artist K8 Hardy on survival in the art market, Paris-based Tuazon acknowledges an irony to his reluctant achievements: “the idea was to build a huge concrete structure, lift it up, turn it over, and let it collapse under its own weight. Technically it was a failure. I mean, it didn’t collapse.” For his edition, ALLOY (FOR STEVE BAER), Tuazon has welded together alloy nuts (think wrench) into a heavy table size geometric form.
After a few days alone in Charline von Heyl‘s studio, painter Joan Waltemath inhabits not just the paintings but her own fantasy of von Heyl at work: the artist has “let a genie out of a bottle, both to conjure and tame the demons that inhabit an unknown realm.” Poet John Yau remarks on von Heyl’s inner-rascal, summing up her deliberate stylistic inconsistencies: “instead of making work that is either nostalgic for modernism or satisfied with reiterating painting’s death,” her tactic is to sabotage painting for the sake of invention. Artist Mary Simpson acknowledges that in our image-saturated culture, it is a radical act to simply stop a viewer in ones tracks. For her edition, LACUNA LOTTO, von Heyl has emerged from the print studio with a series of unique black and white monotypes (with lithograph collage) featuring her elegant tenacity and dramatic sense of line.
Writing on a body of Haegue Yang sculptures—hanging racks on wheels strewn with lights, extension chords, and what writer/theorist Marina Vishmidt calls a “humdrum of household goods”—the Korean born artist admits her tendency to interpret objects figuratively, saying: “Whatever I pick up, I use to portray someone.” Her well-known venetian blind installations conjure the nocturnal word of the private eye detective. MoMA curator Doryun Chong sees Yang performing dimensional leaps across a topography of “exoteric materialism and esoteric spiritualism.” Yang pauses to discuss her work ethic in a conversation with artist Jimmie Durham. For her edition, CUP COSIES, Yang has returned to one of her favorite activities, knitting, producing a unique series with patterns of yarn cylinders wrapped around white plastic cups.
For more details on Parkett 89 content and artists’ editions, subscriptions and back issues, and to connect on facebook please go to www.parkettart.com.
