The New York Times-20080126-Loud Crashes- Dignified Stereotypes and a Touch of Wagner- -Review-

Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080126

Loud Crashes, Dignified Stereotypes and a Touch of Wagner; [Review]

Full Text (613  words)

Julian Rosefeldt, a German artist born in 1965 who lives in Berlin, makes visually opulent, earnestly political films and videos. Most of his work is high-minded, excessively middlebrow and seemingly bent on tweaking consciousness seductively and without strain.

Mr. Rosefeldt's solo show in Chelsea, his first in the United States, is an extravaganza of glossy production values, technical expertise, easy-to-read symbols and battling soundtracks.

The walls in this large and rather grim exhibition space -- normally used for Phillips de Pury & Company auction displays -- do not meet the ceiling, so sounds more than carry. They include trees crashing to the ground in the Amazonian rain forest (from Requiem, a new but sophomoric work); pulsating Indian pop music (from the Bollywood dance scene in the gorgeous Lonely Planet, filmed in Mumbai and Varanasi, India); and Christa Ludwig singing Wagner in the stylish but lugubrious Ship of Fools. The last film also entails a pack of incessantly barking German shepherds and a skinhead wading into a swamp (yes, it is about Nazi Germany).

Further loud crashes emanate by the fabulously pyrotechnic, stunt-laden Stunned Man, in which the same actor, seen in two side-by-side projections, destroys and reassembles apartments that are identical but reversed. A circular set facilitates the camera's continuous panning shot. At one point the actor flings himself from one apartment into the other through their back-to-back bathroom medicine cabinets.

And finally Asylum (2001-2), the show's eight-screen piece de resistance, emits periodic choruses of one-note oms whenever its somnolent guest workers suspend their absurdly ritualized everyday tasks. Muslim women sweep the rocks in a dusty cactus garden; Chinese chefs shred food packaging in the gorilla house of a zoo; scantily clad women identified as Asian prostitutes dust a warehouse full of high-grade imports, including swan sculptures with phallic necks; and Arab men futilely stacking newspapers in a wind tunnel.

Asylum offers a cavalcade of stereotypes who are at once admired, tamed and exploited. Its rich colors and textures evoke theatrical tableaus, tapestries, history painting and its BMW sponsorship.

What is a show this ambitious doing strung through an auction house's sprawling space? The setting is problematic even for auction displays and has proved deadly for the art exhibitions presented there; most, not surprisingly, have been uniformly tacky while feeling abandoned.

Mr. Rosefeldt's show is presented by his Berlin gallery, Arndt & Partner, which has a New York office but as yet no gallery space. It is not tacky, but it is somewhat compromised: Asylum actually consists of nine films, not the eight here. Yet Mr. Rosefeldt's work, like the space itself, is oddly discombobulated.

Mainly it is a skillful, almost seamless patchwork of familiar if hermetic sources -- beginning with Jeff Wall's and Thomas Demand's staged photographs, the films and videos of Stan Douglas, and especially those of the great Chantal Akerman -- but refurbished for the cineplex.

When Mr. Rosefeldt plays down his humanity and cuts loose, as he does in Stunned Man and parts of Lonely Planet, he dazzles. Still, the best part of the experience here may be wandering through the dark, buffeted by the show's swirling if inadvertent sound piece.

Julian Rosefeldt's works are on view through Thursday at Arndt & Partner at Phillips de Pury & Company, 450 West 15th Street, Chelsea; (212) 940-1200.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: Chinese chefs shredding food packaging at a zoo, in a scene from Asylum, part of Julian Rosefeldt's exhibition of videos and films at Phillips de Pury.; Scenes from two Rosefeldt films. Left, an actor dives from one world to another in Stunned Man. Above, a Bollywood number, danced to Indian pop music, in Lonely Planet.(PHOTOGRAPHS FROM JULIAN ROSEFELDT/PHILLIPS DE PURY & COMPANY)