by Nike Desis
There's a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak
@ the Rosenbach Museum & Library
In the Night Kitchen? Yes, definitely a mystery there. Likely a trace of that story lingers in your mind. If you need a refresher, it is worth a refresher. A dreaming boy named Mickey floats around a night kitchen, shedding his clothes as he enters a realm populated by three giant man bakers who bake boys. He escapes being mixed in with the milk and baked in with the bread dough. Sendak hoped to evoke “the lusciousness of cooking, of kneading with your hands, of undressing and floating in the sensuality of milk… thus driving every librarian crazy.” Aside from the narratives, there is a naughty quality and crassness to his dark and scratchy images. They seem to circle the offensive, without coming critically close to offending. He doesn’t deal with innocent and wistful fantasy and avoids the cloying and condescending qualities that fantasies can sometimes have.
If you go to the Rosenbach in the next year, you will find for yourself the smooth display of illustrative work and heavy flow of information through many well designed medias: original illustrations, accompanying print material, multiple touch screens, additional artifacts and objects. You won’t find the stories themselves in the exhibition because in a collection this comprehensive you’ve come to see what’s beyond the book. The book/gift store doesn’t miss a beat, and there I spent a good time rereading the hits. (I didn’t, but I recommend reading before viewing.)
The preliminarily and final drawings on display at the Rosenbach were pretty dreamy to think about as an actual artifact and a unique piece of work. Where the Wild Things Are was published in 1963. The two-page spread of prancing beasts and Max under a full moon are so iconic that it sort of knocks the wind out of you to see a preliminary drawing. It’s like pulling back the Wizard’s curtain once you’ve reached Emerald City. That is what is very useful about surveys like the Rosenbach has presented.
Behind Sendak’s curtain we can also see him border innocence and adult themes. It is all the more transgressive when Sendak plays it out in books intended for children, as he does in work after work. Not that storybooks need necessarily to be transgressive. However, there is some simplicity of surface associated with kid things like gummy bears or coloring books. Those materials and media can be maturely co-opted to dramatic effect with the littlest hints of anything not so innocent.* Monsters and naked kitchens are hardly candy coated, but naughty boys sent to bed with out dinner are naughty boys we can identify with. Once the characters start floating naked in milk and dough, we continue to follow Sendak, but only on his fantastical terms. He says: “There have to be elements of anxiety and mystery in truthful children’s books, or, at least, there have to be in mine. What I don’t like are formless floating fantasies. Fantasy makes sense only if it is rooted ten feet deep in reality.”
I think the following factoid is an interesting, I guess, twist on Sendak's above quote about reality and fantasy. One of the original attractions at the now totally defunct Metreon entertainment shopping center in San Francisco was an In the Night Kitchen themed restaurant, which served diner-style food. Within the same shopping center was also a children's play area, with toys modeled on Sendak's children's books.
I wish I could have been at the Metreon for the super simulation. I mean, to think that In the Night Kitchen was a beginning concept for a restaurant! Food is a basic thing, especially bread with boys narrowly and nakedly escaping from the dough. I’m going to find Baulldriard's famous essay, now that the Rosenbach exhibition, is sending me tangentially, via night kitchens and Metreon malls, straight into simulacra’s lap. For whatever reasons you like things as a child, I especially liked In the Night Kitchen and it turns out it is still deep enough to dig into as an adult.
*** I love those super sour candies, like sour powers and warheads. I relish in the suckering pain, eating them until my tongue is craterous. The experience might be like the eating equivalent of laughing. I’m making a guess that Sendak is a black licorice eater: dark and mature, yet a cavity causing sweet all the same. My own illustrations often rest on the metaphorical and literal idea of the candy coated with a sour puckering adult theme. Similarly, I think some of us make work with the idea that every one thinks kittens are cute. Some can make it go far and some of us fall flat on their kitten loving faces.
[Nike Desis is a published writer/illustrator, whose "Crayon Couture" is an adult-themed activity book chock full of connect-the-dot satire. Desis is also an artist living and working in Philadelphia]
Monday, June 23, 2008
Sendak on Sendak & Nike on Assignment
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Monday, March 31, 2008
The New Museum, Not a Reason to go to NY before March 30th
by Nike Desis
Bear with me here, the Unmonumental show is really unmonumental.
Assemblage is the key theme to the sculpture part of the Unmonumental show and truly the work is fragmented. According to the program assemblage “emphasizes the juxtaposition of elements for symbolic or suggestive effect.” Instead, what gets represented is a bunch of junky sculpture that appropriated a lot of everyday objects to minimal suggestive and tired symbolic effect.
“Rather than enduring and inarguable, they [the sculpture work] are conversational and provisional.” Yes, that’s more like it: ‘conversational’ implies inconclusive conceptual exercises and ‘provisional’ is in this case an excuse for some visually inconclusive work. No, I’m not joking! Real crap. Piece by piece. I’m not blaming each artist because we all pile up our empty egg cartons and yogurt containers and make an after-dinner sculpture. But most of us don’t have a chance to critically display it.
Perhaps these artists have a whole series buttons glued onto mattresses back in their studios or galleries. Guess what, I don’t care if they have a whole country full of button covered mattresses, because that is really not going to legitimize the one I see here. Hey, let’s play two similarly boring YouTube videos next to each other and call it an unmonumental video collage! It sure is an interesting coincidence found on the vast space that is YouTube. But these observations are something to show and tell with your roomies after lunch and make for really boring art.
By Unmonumental object, I think the also they meant unmarket. Outside of the art market is totally cool and brave (right?) But the unmarket genre is also a potentially dangerous crap trap.
Just off the top of my head I can think of a bunch of unmarket sculptures from recent Philadelphia gallery shows that are 100 times more worthwhile.
Like J.L.Makary’s sound and video piece at the Nexus new members show (just up last month).
Or Mike Stifle’s bottles of bubbling foam that both holds and changes its form at FLUXspace (up now).
How about the woman from VCU who made a wall out of clay on the wall at the Grey Space in front of the Ice Box (just up last month).
And Joe DiGiuseppe’s well contructed and interactive piece where you can dance on buttons and make light at the Esther Klein Gallery at the Science Center (up now).
Oh, and Martha Savory’s and Daniel Petraitis’s wall of nik naks from their studios (all for sale) at Little Berlin a while back.
All of these sculpture/ object/ things have elements of assemblage, appropriation, being ‘new’ and otherwise fit the New Museum’s unmonumental show concept as they’ve described it in their literature AND, more importantly, these works aren’t boring to look at or think about.
Back at the New Museum, in addition to the unmonumnetal object there were three other parts, billed as separate curatorial aspects: the sound, the collage, the video/ internet. Sound I have nothing to say about. The collage was acceptable, even exciting. The video was great and awful and I could chat a whole other entry on what I saw on New Museum’s screens.
I think my aversion to the work was just that I was particularly surprised to see it in NY, in whatever hip neighborhood I was in, and in a contemporary art focused place called the New Museum. But surprise aside, if Philly’s scene had that space, that budget, the show title, between us all, we could have put a real monumental Unmonumental show with conceptual integrity as well as exciting unmarket sculpture because as I see it, exciting unmarket sculpture is what the Philly scene happens to do well. Please respond.
[Nike Desis is currently in the midst of publishing "Crayon Couture",an adult-themed activity book chock full of connect- the -dot satire, both written and illustrated by the artist. Desis is also an artist living and working in Philadelphia]
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Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Look! as reviewed by Nike Desis
Landmarks Contemporary Projects
Presents PIMA Group: LOOK!
Performances February 1-3, 2008 @ Powel House Museum
The program I attended was a night performance of the Philadelphia based non-profit group PIMA at the Powel House, a historic house museum in Olde City.
There seems to be a sterility associated with historical landmarks. But, these were and are houses filled with people and narratives. Historical things and places are usually detached from their original purposes as a part of real and everyday life so it’s a common affliction of landmarks to be presented in a static far removed way. Timelines and stories and connections are ever changing.
Look! certainly explored the static sense of museum atmosphere and there was a direct representation of static in some of the dancers more spastic movements, in the live dj-ing of cranky crunchy sounds, and in fuzzy projections. These static-y visual stuffs are also paradoxically full of movement, digital technology, and a progression of time - through the pixilated recreation of scenes from moments before, thrown sound, and with muttered whispery phrases by the dancers into your face/ear. These were especially successful effects for contemplating a dynamic sense of the past. Like the program says: “By activating empty spaces around the house- spaces that represent centuries of life, work, decay and rebirth-PIMA provides audience with a rare opportunity to link the past with contemporary experience. They are explorers in a space that is at once inviting and distant trying to make sense of a site through the haze of time.”
So, in thinking about the whole package, it was obvious I was seeing some contemporary work- dance, bright tights, and mannequins as markers among others- but the history of the house itself receded into the background. Intellectually I understood the idea of doing a new and multi media performance in specific site, but as a visual piece I perhaps wanted it to be a little more transgressive than it was. What was it about the Powel House itself that I needed to know about? It wasn’t clear. But then again, maybe it was enough to have just been there for an event other than a stuffy house tour. Did I expect to come away with a better understanding of antique furniture? No. So, I guess I appreciated the building as a vessel for a new art work, which already moved me into a new direction of experiencing a house like the Powel House.
As for the actual choreography of the dance, there were some wonderful movement moments that I latched onto. I was interested in the dramatic scenes where all the dancers reconvened and marched up and down the stairs. Fast movements in a dark, intimate bedroom in front of a mirror and a prop fire were also memorable. Without neglecting the audience, the dancers would also, for example, finish a dining room ditty and slowly, while looking you in the eye, close the door behind her and leave you totally, awkwardly alone in a room. In the moments where when I found the movement less interesting I could easily go to another part of the house and see what was going on in there.
The last time I was in a historic mansion, I happened to have some freedom during the house’s off hours and I ran through the infinite rooms and staircases turning lights on and off, opening and closing doors, glancing or contemplating, and hearing creepy sounds where there weren’t any. I had a surreal pleasure of being in a place of immeasurable monumental value and surrounded by objects of unknown historical value -with out any supervision. Contemporary art and history have that at least in common: unknown, immeasurable cultural value and a rush of discovery. I didn’t so much as cough on any of the furniture, but there was a sense of transgression in my own self-guided running tour of Strawberry Mansion. PIMA’s Look! included some running from room to room choreography, and that was a kind of drama I could seriously identify with at the Powel House.
[Nike Desis is currently in the midst of publishing "Crayon Couture",an adult-themed activity book chock full of connect- the -dot satire, both written and illustrated by the artist. Desis is also an artist
living and working in Philadelphia]
Labels:
Nike Desis
