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Art at Chung King

by Nancy Lupo

Männerphantasien

Francois Ghebaly Gallery

510 Bernard St., Los Angeles, CA 90012

September 8, 2007 - October 13, 2007

Something happened at Chung King Project and it looks like art. There is a half beaten piñata hanging open. Goose down and hard candies wrapped in reflective Mylar have slopped out onto the gallery’s pseudo-industrial grey floor. There are three more piñatas covered with feathers and tied up. They wait in a clump for another customer and another break. During the forty-five minuets I spent in the gallery, an older man came in, picked up a few pieces of candy and ate them while sitting Indian style in the middle of the floor. A young boy ran into the gallery, looked up at me boldly and grabbed a handful of candy before running back outside to his mother. The piñatas are the work of Philippines-born, Berlin-based artist Rommelo Yu who is part of the group show, Männerphantasien,curated by Ellen Blumenstein at Chung King Project.

The show takes its title from Klaus Theweleit’s monumental two-volume book published in German in 1977, and a decade later in English under the title Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. The book examines the connections between misogyny and fascism in the German Freikorps following World War I. In the book, Theweleit analyzes the letters, fiction and propaganda created by the subculture and finds evidence to suggest that they committed acts of violence not because of a pathological misfire but because they wanted to. Theweleit’s study was one of the first to put forth a rigorous critical analysis regarding the artifacts of a very particular and marginalized subculture. Because it touched on so many of the same issues and concerns present in post-modern art practice, many art movements and “isms” since have paid homage to Theweleit’s importance in the world of ideas. This new offering includes artists who are, like Yu, young men that live and work in Berlin although they originate from other countries and have mixed cultural backgrounds.

What makes Männerphantasien look so much like ‘art’ is the fact that grouped together in a room, the works in the show read as a kind of scatter survey of artistic movements and styles from the past 1,000 years. On one end of this trajectory, Dennis Rudolph presents two uniformly sized oil paintings. The first, entitled Siegfried, is a frontal portrait of a man with a strong face and deep-set eyes. His face frontal portrait of a man with a strong face and deep-set eyes. His face is rendered smooth and as white as porcelain, which removes him even further from the black ground behind him. The companion portrait entitled, Schongauer, is a ¾ view with the face rendered sooty black with a clean white porcelain ground behind him.

The art historical trajectory continues with the French-born Damien Deroubaix’s wall-sized expressionist painting entitled, Lord of All Fevers and Plague. Dominating the scene is a gigantic fish flashing his sharp teeth as he eats up the word ‘fever.’ Deroubaix’s expressionism then gives way to the ‘conceptual’ and even humorous works of Michael Müller who squarely engages a minimalist tradition with works like UV Disappearing – a pink piece of blotting paper with a rectangle like frame that was presumably exposed to UV light. Marcellvs L., who has just relocated to Berlin from Brazil, has an HD “video still” of a locked off shot of a train yard. In the background a soundtrack of domestic life plays out. It is certainly reminiscent of early video experiments by Michael Snow and the feature work of Chantal Akerman.

What looks the least like art but is certainly the most shocking work in the show are Martin Dammann’s Soldier Studies. For these ‘studies’ Dammann restores and reprints actual historical photographs of soldiers and sailors dressing up as women staging a marriage, a lunch date with the ladies and an erotic boudoir encounter between a sailor and lady.

The photograph that really reveals the historical context is of a young man who has thick legs and strong features dressed up in a bra and skirt slip. He is wearing a white sunhat and parading the Nazi flag over his head as he goes along in little white tennis shoes. These images are disturbing precisely in that even though they are presented by Martin Dammann as works of ‘art’ they are still not works of the imagination or derivation. With so much forced reality permeating and being pointed out in everything, these photographs function in the opposite way. In fact, they even bestow some humanity on these soldiers if only for the slight suggestion they are attempting to subvert the evil army they work for by undermining its iron morals.

(*Images from top to bottom: Männerphantasien, September 8 - October 13, 2007, Chung King Project, Installation view, Courtesy of Chung King Project. Männerphantasien, September 8 - October 13, 2007, Chung King Project, Installation view, Courtesy of Chung King Project. Dennis Rudolph, Männerphantasien, September 8 - October 13, 2007, Chung King Project, Siegfried, 2007, oil on panel, 80 x 80 cm, Courtesy of Chung King Project. Dennis Rudolph, Männerphantasien, September 8 - October 13, 2007, Chung King Project, Shhongauer, 2007, oil on panel, 80 x 80 cm, Courtesy of Chung King Project. Martin Dammann, Männerphantasien, September 8 - October 13, 2007, Chung King Project, Soldier Studies (Flagg), 2007, light-jet print on aluminum, 76.8 x 52.3 cm, Courtesy of Chung King Project.)

Posted by Nancy Lupo on 9/23/07