ART CITIES: N.York-Chopped & Screwed
“Chopped & Screwed”, the inaugural exhibition at White Cube New York, considers the use of sourcing and distortion in contemporary art to resist established systems of power and value. The exhibition’s title makes oblique reference to the technique of the same name, popularised by the late Houston musician DJ Screw in the early 1990s. The selection of artists for the show apply similar approaches to medium, form and aesthetic inheritances, each challenging, undermining or malforming existing hegemonic conditions and prevailing narratives.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: White Cube Gallery Archive
With a focus on authoritarian governance, patriarchy and religion, the participating artists in “Chopped & Screwed”, interrogate the power inherent to archetypes, whether material, structural or symbolic. It is a deliberate application of clandestine methods, both subtle and exacting, to establish new visual language. Often starting from familiar motifs and objects, the use of sampling becomes a transgressive act that implicates the conflicts of contemporary life. In turn, their reconfigurations constitute alternative readings to both conditions of power and realities of living. David Altmejd’s work is a unique and heady mix of science and magic, science fiction and gothic romanticism: a post-apocalyptic vision which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention. Michael Armitage’s paintings weave multiple narratives that are drawn from historical and current news media, popular culture, and his own ongoing recollections of Kenya, his country of birth. Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, an area that later became the German Democratic Republic, or DDR. In 1957, after his second term studying painting at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in East Berlin, he was sent down for ‘political immaturity’. Later that year, he moved to West Berlin’s Academy of Art, completing his studies there in 1962. It was during this period that he adopted the surname Baselitz, after his birthplace. Thaster Gates’s practice includes sculpture, installation, performance, urban intervention and land development. Through his work as an artist, archivist, and curator, Gates seeks to instigate the creation of cultural communities by acting as catalysts for social engagement that leads to political and spatial change. Mona Hatoum’s poetic and political work incorporates installations, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. Hatoum started her career in the 1980s making visceral video and performance work that focused intensely on the body. Since the early 1990s, however, she has increasingly created large-scale installations that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. In her sculptures, Hatoum transforms familiar, everyday items such as chairs, cots and kitchen utensils into works that seem foreign, dangerous or even threatening. Over the past 40 years, Christian Marclay has explored the fusion of fine art and audio cultures, transforming sound and music into a visible, physical form through performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video. Tiona Nekkia McClodden takes an interdisciplinary approach as a visual artist, filmmaker and curator to interrogate ideas of ritual and order through its relationship to identity and the conditions of being human. Traversing documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, sound installation and poetry, her practice explores themes of Black interiority, biomythography and queer poetics. Ideas of time, space and place are enmeshed in the work of Julie Mehretu. Drawing is fundamental to her practice, whether in works on paper, painting or printmaking. The artist’s dextrous mark-making comes together in a characteristic swirl, an act of assertion in response to social and political change. ‘As I continue drawing,’ she says, ‘I find myself more and more interested in the idea that drawing can be an activist gesture. That drawing – as an informed, intuitive process, a process that is representative of individual agency and culture, a very personal process – offers something radical.’ Ilana Savdie explores themes of performance, transgression, identity and power in her vibrant, large-scale paintings. Assembling fragments into finely detailed, fluid compositions, her canvases pulsate with flamboyant colour, conjoining, merging and blending their forms in an aesthetics of riotous excess. At their core, Savdie’s paintings aim to dismantle ideas of binary or fixed identity, and to embrace the notion of performance as a transformative tool. Through a body of personal work inspired also by historical and political events, Danh Vo probes into the inheritance and construction of cultural conflicts, traumas, and values. When Vo was a child, his family fled Vietnam and settled in Denmark: their assimilation to European culture and the political events that prompted their flight are intrinsic to his artistic investigations.
Participating Artists: David Altmejd, Michael Armitage, Georg Baselitz, Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, General Idea, Robert Gober, Philip Guston, David Hammons, Mona Hatoum, Christian Marclay, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Julie Mehretu, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Carol Rama, Ilana Savdie, Danh Vo
Photo: Mona Hatoum, + and -, 1994-2004, Steel, aluminium, sand and electric motor, Edition of 3, Height: 10 5/8 x diam. 400 cm | m. 157 1/2 in., Photo © Markus Elblaus. Courtesy Arab Museum of Modern Art
Info: Curator: Courtney Willis Blair, White Cube Gallery, 1002 Madison Ave., New York, NY, USA, Duration: 3-28/10/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.whitecube.com/