A red landscape with a red foggy night. Sitting and meditating.

Result #1

A red landscape with a red foggy night. Sitting and meditating. Dressed in white, an open book bearing the words culture is the language of the world hangs in a corner of the gallery. On the left is a pair of puffy hands; on the right is a chain of photos taken from some neighborhood-mapping project. In the center is a black-and-white photograph of a house. From this culturally aware, banal, and disposable world we imagine the writer as a black cis-female transvestite—as if we are witnessing the unconscious self-image of the performer and producer, which is not only revealed by the depictions of a place, but also represented by the blackness of the participants hands, the colored-glass windows of a house, and the paintings on a wall. It is this interface, expressed through the representational that is important here.It is through this image of the body and hand, with the surrounding surrounding walls and furniture, that the piece unfolds. At first glance, it is as if we are looking at a group of portraits; they are surrounded by a dense, indistinct gray and blue, each with a pair of red lips, in a gray-on-blue palette. We see a smattering of fingers and a hand in some kind of ritual dance in the center, as if to signify the relational structure of the relationship between body and space. However, we quickly see that the two hands are on opposite sides of the desk, a process that is stressed by the alternating pockmarking of the lips and fingers. In fact, the gesture is one that belongs to both hands, but the picture is more than a cross-examination of the relationships between them. It expresses the dialectic of gender, of who is dominant and who is subordinate.The photographic image is presented with the same formal complexity as that of the abstract painting, and the same spirit of mechanical reproduction as that of mass photography.

Result #2

Arting in the various ways you may use to describe the women in Whitney Finkens paintings, her figures—some are meditating, others are, as in a portrait, thinking—are empty, complex, even contradictory, infinitely elaborately rounded and reworked. Her figures are always complex, yet not necessarily complex in themselves, neither are they a collection of isolated fragments: they are bodies and their bodies are illusions, and illusions that are concrete, human.Finkens paintings are about the body, the body not as it is but as it is interpreted by the mind. Finkens figure paintings tend to be too figure-oriented, but also too abstract—in some cases the figure is almost entirely abstracted—and the imagery tends to be decorative. Finkens figures are all unconscious, all of them recognizable as individuals, like well-known fashion models but without individual identity, making them figures of emptiness, not of intelligence. For all the figures of Finkens paintings seem like impersonal diagrams of an absence, the mind as an empty instrument and a universal signifier.The imagery of Finkens paintings is subtle, clear, powerful and suggestive: the figures are embodied in an exotic position, the pose ambiguous. The figures can be read from front to back, and in the works by Finken, the figures seem to pivot in a mental space out of our visual field, sometimes walking forward, sometimes crouching, sometimes standing. It is as though they are defenseless, but their terror is not, like our terror of absent bodies, a fear of our own absent presence, but a fear of being out of sight and out of mind.

Result #3

The ceremony continued in the homage to the village. The young people stepped to the side, raising their hands in acknowledgment. Some of them seemed to be close friends of the artist, while others—mostly older and white men—were a part of his family. The famous villagers were now his neighbors, and after this gesture the artist had to step aside. He was very much the figurehead of this all-important ritual.It is not surprising that the elderly played such a significant role in Martíns oeuvre: A couple of years ago he exhibited a series of photographs taken in the countryside, which are nearly identical to his earlier works, but they date from the 70s. The images show people walking in the streets of the village and carrying stones, ropes, etc. as a sign of devotion to their ancestral traditions. As with the public events, the action is performed for the public, with ritual rules that can be followed but not repeated.It is not clear whether Martíns decision to follow this path of renunciation was in response to the ritualization of art as a transcendent act, as Marcel Duchamp argued, or, more precisely, to a pure process of elimination. His aim was to purge art of all ritual and signifying, and he succeeded. The art of this time was free of ritual and signifying. The expressive power of Martíns work lies, however, in its existence as a pure, enigmatic medium of communication.The artist has not called for a return to the earlier, ritualized image. He wanted to be free of his ritualism. There is a great freedom here: to stand and express ones individuality, which has nothing to do with the image of another.

Result #4

A red landscape with a red foggy night. Sitting and meditating. In a line of Vipassanas: the richly coated, the wild and profane. some-times those who in desire are filled with violence, other times those who take refuge in peace. Not so the yama no nara of the motley group of red spots. Yes, some is alive and well: four of them, hanging from the beams of a post. These are our visitors. They are also the pilgrims who havent come to visit the Buddha, who has died. This is the first time since 1979 when these red spots are to be arranged around the Buddha. They are a show of protection and the impromptu memorial.The installation is the Buddhist equivalent of a work of art: gathered around the Buddha, their incision into the surface of things conveys their need for doing. While the yellow and the green are the hallmark colors of the Indian religion, the whites are distinctly the colors of the World Trade Center. Each is a black mark. Then the image of the Buddha becomes a reproduction of the Last Judgment. The barriers of the separation of the faith and the world are gone, replaced by the barriers of danger. The only places left are the blind and the deaf. These are the dias. Their absence has led to a great diversity, beginning with the shadows, living and dead. These are the mounds of the immigrants. In other words, the body in mourning.The inner voice. This is the problem of India. Although the dharma was a Hindu sacrament, and people wear a traditional dhoti, the universal is Indian. We live in the early eighties, a world in which a country has been changed into a post-European–a transatlantic conflation of religions and cultures. India has, as a status symbol, been an unyielding and almost uncritical ally. To be Indian. To be an Indian. These are also the search for the archetypal. In the quest for the sacred.

Result #5

A red landscape with a red foggy night. Sitting and meditating. Sleeping in the back.erential. will no doubt be the charge for many of the newly relocated New York art-world types. Since the '80s, this group of avant-garde believers has increasingly been dismissed as the heirs to the '80s zeitgeist. Whether or not the '80s is still a time of generalized contradictions—of erosion of all those enervated New York utopias, of dissolution of the avant-garde, and of the traditionalist impulse to explore the divine (as seen in the work of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, James Lee Byars, and David Salle)—all the more reason is the new and the young, the electronic, the computer-savvy, to take up the mantle of modern art. But there are exceptions—the taciturn Zap #1, for instance, or the outspoken art of Beuys, who is often credited with inventing the now-celebrated and thoroughly subversive '80s movement. This is not to mention recent string of high-profile afterthoughts such as Robert Smithson or Dave Muller, or the curious but compelling brouhaha over the failure of such artists as Dave Muller, whose sprawling installation of projected computer animation can still be admired.Few artists have positioned themselves in such a good light as David Salle. He has always been open to the kind of uncompromising, brilliant, and original approach to art that often prevails in the art worlds of the present. Working within an artistic milieu that has seen history unfold in the last twenty years, he has only developed a truly global and international persona. He is clearly an artist of immense sensibility and wit, and one can see his work everywhere. One might even say that he has entered the eponymous position of the ultimate outsider, but as the title of this show makes clear, hes an artist of his time.