-
feature
78 may / june 2015
The video starts off simply enough: teen or pre-teen skaters of
modest ability fly through a sunny, suburban context. They document
middling kick flips over low curbs with a handheld camcorder and an
extra-wide-angle lens. The teens off-camera voices dont reveal any
particularly distinct geographic locale besides North American. Not
thirty seconds into the ride, the skaters are interrupted by a
panicked women. She rushes them, pleading for help in a strong
Eastern European accent. As she accosts one of the skaters, he
jumps off his board and she quickly kneels to grab it. The woman
then turns and takes off, yelling for the kids to follow. The scene
takes us to a nearby parking lot, where the womens two young
children, between one and two years of age, are trapped inside a
minivan. She and her husband beg the skaters to break the windows
of the car so that the toddlers may be freed. The boys try.
The video, a work by the young artist Bradley Kronz (b. 1986,
American; lives in New York), was presented at Team Gallerys new
exhibition site in Los Angeles earlier this year. There, the
humdrum but briefly tense narrative of the piece was projected and
looped. Its main, uncut video segment was found online by the
artist. Rather than manipulate the footage, Kronz de-cided to
present it unedited, only adding a brief abstract animation at the
very end of the piece. From a series of digitally rendered
inter-titles before this bookending abstraction, we learn that the
source material dates back to 2010. So why does the work look so
90s? Maybe its the grain and colors of the interlaced stream, which
sug-gests a MiniDV or similar camcorder in use. Maybe its the
fisheye lens. Or, perhaps its the genre of the thing itself: kids
who skate recording their exploits, imitat-ing a style of skate
video formalized in the 80s and widely popularized in the early 90s
a time when such tapes could only be found in neighborhood skate
shops and mail-order catalogs. The skate video genre is one
whose stability was put into flux since the emergence of YouTube
and other video-sharing services, as well as the general
democratization of video recording tech-nology via even the most
modest of smart phones. In this regard, Kronzs own video seems a
bit historically adrift. Its out of register with the time of the
source material: this found footage is neither historical nor
exactly contemporary. Rather, one could describe it as a rapidly
aging piece of media, lacking the advanced software-enhanced
clarity of an iPhone video clip. It lays out its narrative against
a cloyingly saturated video-blue sky and a contrived wide-angle
view.
The way this particular work traffics its formal payload of
found footage brings to mind the ways in which Martha Rosler has
written about the discarded commodity. Not old enough to evoke
nostalgia, only shame, the cast-off commodity, according to Rosler,
is an artifact of culture that belongs to the just-past, seem-ingly
awkward and out of place in the context of the present. This is a
period in the commoditys life before it can be considered vintage
or once again desirable, a metonym for an entirely different era or
symbolic regime. This is the culture of our parents, the clothes we
were wearing five (rather than ten) years ago, our discarded
ambitions and ideals: all things that are un-comfortable to think
about from the perspective of the present. The kids in Kronzs piece
originally set out to make a skate video and failed. There is
little skat-ing in what theyve produced. Their failure, however, is
perhaps not so incongruent with the artists own. Rather than making
aggressive cuts or perplexing jux-tapositions as a generational
predecessor may have done (think of Rosler or Elaine Sturtevant),
Kronz simply footnotes the found footage with a touch of
abstrac-tion. Lets take this as an entry point to thinking about
some of the other works Kronz has produced over the past two
years.
Caring, CaringBoko Blagojevic on the art of Bradley Kronz
Next page:Untitled (2015)Courtesy of the Artist and Team
Gallery, New York
-
feature
80 may / june 2015
In his summer 2014 exhibition The Ambitions of Large and Small
Things at the gallery Off Vendome in Dsseldorf, Kronz presented an
untitled set of two related (but individual) paintings, both
depicting red hands in subtle gestures against a bright,
out-of-view spotlight. The hands cast shadow puppets in the light:
silhouettes of a dog and a hare. These paintings, hung only inches
apart, actually originate from a single, found canvas Kronz rescued
from a trash bin at one of his several short-term studio sublets.
To make it his own, Kronz split the painting in half, literally
cutting it, and in the process serialized an otherwise monolithic
work not unlike the way so many painters today serialize their
working methods to create unique but highly reproducible bodies of
work. For Kronz, the body already reaches its reproductive limits
at two. Thus, an unloved painting begins a second life as a
du-ality: freed from its stretcher bars and inserted into the paper
stock frames for which Kronz has become known.
What happens when a painting begins a second life in Kronzs
frames? The artist has cautiously deployed
this strategy in other works, over the course of several
exhibitions, in turn beginning to work as a painter. The first
thing that happens is a general slackening. A paint-ing in some
sense is defined by its tautness, whether it is stretched across
bars or simply a panel or board. Kronzs shadow-puppet painting in
this regard is now suddenly lankier, hanging more loosely,
malleable. Like a muscular, disciplined body suddenly made limber
with a stretching regimen, the painting seems larger in subtle
ways. Bits of canvas previously confined to the back of the
stretcher bars are now visible near the edges of the artists frame.
Secondly, a sort of inherent naturalism returns to the paintings
substrate, which rolls and moves, ever so slightly, as it comes to
inhabit its new dwelling.
Kronzs paper frames are tricky constructions. En-countered in
digital images on the Internet, theyre easy to miss. They dont
attract the eye nearly as much as his hand-rendered drawings or the
photographs and paint-ings Kronz appropriates to make his own. The
frames are often quite thin in relation to the work they encase.
They also rarely contrast or make a visual fuss with their tenant
works. Sometimes they arent picture frames at all, but rather the
ground upon which he arranges and manipulates one or more found
photographs. Unlike their professional counterparts, these frames
dont pro-fess an overwhelming concern with presentation. In this
sense they operate with a modicum of stealth, but they dont exactly
seek to disappear. On the contrary, like a shy but eccentric party
guest, they become hard to ignore after they are noticed. They
often show up in exhibitions disheveled and scratched-up,
occasionally cracking at the edges. They might be made of cardstock
of various types or very high-end watercolor paper. Oth-ers are
constructed from repurposed, ready-made card-board framing stock,
often left unfolded or otherwise deconstructed. Some are just
sloppy, one might even say.
If professional frames buttress an aura of value, desire or
status in an art object, Kronzs frames exhibit something much more
fugitive: they exhibit a kind of nave care on the part of the
artist. Consider his 2013 exhibition JUD at New Yorks Essex Street
gallery. There, a series of drawings, photographs and sculptural
compositions were presented by the artist, many of them in custom
cardstock frames. In one wall-bound work, Moms 280C (2013), two
photographs from the artists family archive are playfully pinned to
an uncon-structed paper frame kit the artist uses as the ground for
the composition. The images he chose to present in this work are
the kind of photos that would be awkward in a family album. These
are unpeopled images: there are no grinning family members, views
of an exotic vacation locale, no toddlers posing with grandparents.
There is no family gathering or important ceremony being depicted
in these pictures. Rather, there are simply two nearly identical
photographs of a car in the process of being painted. It calls to
mind the kind of vanity portrait a young man might take of his
first automobile, souped-up or freshly painted function-ing not
unlike a second girlfriend, an extension of the
This page:TBT triangle (2015)Courtesy of the Artist and Team
Gallery, New York
Next page, above:Untitled (detail, 2014)Courtesy of the Artist
and Off Vendome, Dsseldorf/New York
Next page, below:Untitled (2014)Installation view at Off
Vendome, DsseldorfCourtesy of the Artist and Off Vendome,
Dsseldorf/New York
-
featurefeature
83 may / june 201582 may / june 2015
approach, seeking to preserve or isolate works of art from the
natural world and the forces of time. Rather, his framing is more
in the spirit of the kind of sentiment that proxies the affective
energies we have for our loved ones onto family photos and their
possessions, long after they have departed. Its an uncertain and
flighty kind of sentiment with which we stay connected to that
which is now out of reach. Its flimsy. Rather than af-firming a
triumph over time with technology, like the industry of personal
media and photography seems to promise us, Kronzs work suggests a
response to times passing that is mournful, sweeter.
Solo exhibitions: Team Gallery, Los Angeles; High Art, Paris;
Off Vendome, Dsseldorf; Essex Street, New York.Group exhibitions:
Mathew, New York; Boatos Fine Arts, So Paulo; Night Club, Chicago;
Tomorrow, New York;
Bed Stuy Love Affair, New York; Shoot the Lobster, New York;
Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Tomorrow, Toronto;
Foxy Production, New York.
Boko Blagojevi is an art writer and co-founder of Svetlana, New
York.
This page:xxuuuzs. 1n (2015)Installation view at Team Bungalow,
Los AngelesCourtesy of the Artist and Team Gallery, New York
Next page, above:Moms 280C (2013)Courtesy of the Artist and
Essex Street, New York
Next page, below:Untitled (detail, 2014)Courtesy of the Artist
and High Art, Paris
male ego, a kind of symbolic phallus. But its hardly a
vainglorious moment for the vehicle in Kronzs work. Missing a
bumper and half-painted, the Mercedes in the image a low-end
Mercedes in an American garage, already a powerful aspirational
symbol is presented as a kind of vulnerable, naked commodity. Its a
com-modity stripped of its prestige and further cheapened by a
visual doubling. Unlike other works in the show, the edges of the
photographs are not covered by fram-ing material. Instead, the
pictures are presented bare.
In another work from the same exhibition, Jeep (2013), we see a
swiftly dashed-off marker drawing approximating a photograph. The
image, somewhat abstracted by the tight cropping of its subject
matter, is an image of vacancy: the traces of a dislodged Jeep car
logo, the American brand of capable masculinity, occupies the
center of the image like a ghost. A drawing inspired by another
sort of reject-image from a fam-ily album, Kronz entombs it in an
off-white cardstock frame. The result is sort of funny. Rather than
protect-ing the already stained paper from the exposure of UV light
or physical trauma, Kronzs frame offers us instead the artists twee
affirmation that this image is cared for. In place of a caption, a
narrative or a relationship, we have only this vacant, ineffective
promise. Dads jeep? A healthy brand logo is already something that,
when it works, evokes sentiment as much as it encourages us to pour
our own sentiment into it. As such, every
logo and every commodity envies the family heirloom. Commodities
that serve us longer and with more inti-mate contact and purpose
like a car, for instance, in which one experiences many emotions
over many years of ownership often create deeper and more intimate
bonds with their possessors. Kronz often presents us with work that
is materially insignificant; that is, made from inexpensive or
discarded material. But through operations of framing, presentation
and doubling, he creates what appears to be a kind of auratic
context of care and importance between himself and these objects.
The work is strongest, however, at the moment of the outsiders
confrontation with it. Imagine coming face-to-face with Kronzs
presentation of family photos or drawings in slapdash, homemade
cardboard frames works that explicitly mime counterparts in the
world of commodities and personal media with the deliberately
flatfooted affect of a theater prop. These objects will suddenly
seem to mock us: how do we submit to the affective regime Kronz
fabricates with such subtle pro-cess and downtrodden material? How
to fall under the spell of something so foreign, so explicitly
ineffective?
Writing about the Essex Street exhibition two years ago, I
compared the works in it to coffins, which maybe they are. Coffins,
after all, are vessels with which we affirm the sanctity of the
human body after its animat-ing forces have long withdrawn.
Consider the logic of the artists custom frames. His is not a
museological