#dmitri obergfell

[mimeticspace]

Dmitri Obergfell

[artruby]

Dmitri Obergfell.

[mdme-x]

Dmitri Obergfell.

[willmeiertext]

Dmitri Obergfell: Death of the Cool

via One Good Eye (Denver)

INTRO:

This is the first of a series of experimental writings about, and in collaboration with, select Denver artists. Having no specific agenda other than an interest in these artists’ work, the plan is to have a conversation with them in their studio about whatever happens to come up. There’s no Q&A, no topics to necessarily cover, and honestly, if there’s one thing I want from these experiments, it’s for them to feel different than your typical artist interview. A conversation that is true to the work and the personalities of the artists and myself.

I hope to document the personality of the conversation itself. So keeping the process organic beyond their studio and back into my own, the writing produced will inherit the thematic trajectory of the dialogue directly, with my role as writer being to subsume both peoples’ viewpoints, conclusions, questions, answers, misdirections, etc., into a single, weirdly tangential perspective.

DMITRI OBERGFELL: THE DEATH OF THE COOL

Dmitri Obergfell’s process fills the entire main space of Leisure Gallery, his current studio, in preparation for his show, Man is a Bubble and Time Is a Place, opening at Gildar Gallery March 23. Rap music from Macbook speakers echoes around our conversation. The entire time I was in there, he never paused from making molds. I started in at the natural place: What’s this show about?

Basically, it’s a meditation on “Deep Time” — an idea sampled from 2001: A Space Odyssey (the book), in which one of the most defining moments was the first time a proto-human got bored. Thus began the search for meaning, leading to the creation of symbols, the original “victory over time” that allowed information to be passed to future generations. But this sounds romantic, which isn’t the point. Dmitri is mainly just curious about what might possibly in the future be considered an artifact representative of our current era of massive overproduction.

Really, though, think about what this might be in our current, pop culture-obsessed world. The commodity of what we might call Cool? It’s certainly what’s being produced in rap and pop music, and just about every other corner of cultural industry other than art (as artists would love you to think — but really, their Cool is a commodity too, just more codified).

This has always resonated in Obergfell’s art for me, even at surface value, reflected in the chameleon paint signature to his style. The “flip paint,” as it’s sometimes known, which changes color under varying light conditions, embodies the theme of change and originally came from his fascination with car modification culture, where people have this eerily invested relationship with objects. Weirdly similar to Egyptian funerary art — some of the most extraordinary artworks ever produced, with express intent to be immediately put in the ground. I’ve personally felt for most of my life that the purpose of capital-A-Art is easiest to grasp in a sarcophagus. And I know it isn’t just Obergfell and myself who are on this wavelength: it was one of the most beautiful themes in Matthew Barney’s largely grueling film-opera, River of Fundament, screened in town as an arrival present from DAM curator Becky Hart not too long ago.

But really, for the majority of history, most art arguably had to do with some spiritual notion of death, all the way up until it made a departure from Christianity and began a slow descent into a sort of crisis as it began to become increasingly about only itself. Some might even say that modernism was a result of art becoming aware of its own mortality, with abstraction and minimalism and postmodern schools of self-referentiality becoming obsessively anxious about their encroaching deaths.

That’s a bit pessimistic, though, which is a sort of inapplicable frame for pieces like Dmitri’s recent installation featured in DAM’s Mi Tierra, which reads as not only profoundly Cool, in its chrome-plated, flip-painted, nails-did, speaker-boxed, narco-saint-swearing, tequila-shot-taking visual vocabulary, but also heartfelt, detail-oriented, and really very fresh and futuristic. Obergfell brings up Robert Smithson saying something like, “installation isn’t about filling up a room, it’s about taking things out.” This aside, though, perhaps one of the greatest strengths of this piece is that it isn’t art-about-art. It feels like it’s made for non-artists to enjoy — a product of the MTV / internet age, not just in its references, but in its attenuation to short attention spans with dozens of layered, individual moments for viewers to explore with reward at their leisure. To thumb through like the window shoppers we all are, until the museum revokes the public’s entry privileges because we can’t stop ourselves from doing so (true story).

The fact that Dmitri’s works can be understood and appreciated by both artists and those who know nothing about art cannot be emphasized enough. His artworks’ brand of Cool is that of common symbology, things cool to regular people, in some ways analogous to really exceptionally-produced radio-rap. There’s a persistent legibility, even if you don’t know the prerequisite slang (artSpeak) to understand everything being said. And this is really important to him, mainly because art is in a really dangerous place in our current political climate. Much of the public may come to (if they don’t already) view being an artist as some sort of con, and regardless of any individual cases of subjective truth to that effect, it’s a fact that art is at least threatened by more forms of recreation and entertainment than ever before, constantly competing for increasingly shorter attention spans.

It’s true, sadly. The magic that often lived in art — in Stonehenge, in representational painting, in philosophical minimalism — where is it now? Because mystery, wonder, and “how the hell?” often feel like they now belong to software. And while art has always progressed in tandem with technology, is it a given that, as just one of many incarnations of information, it’s exempt from an expiration date?

This all leads me to the place where I don’t think what might be an “average” perspective on art misses the point at all. If art has this anxiety about its own death, which it compensates for by incessantly semantically proving it’s existential value in this core way, perpetuated by an industry where accumulating generations of post-Duchampian, self-proclaimed Artists successively come-of-age wanting to believe that the fortune they spent on their art-school education was worthwhile — okay, it’s a big ‘if’, but if that’s true — it kinda makes sense that artists wouldn’t want to just make “some shit that’s cool”. But whether tastes are fabricated by capitalism or not, whether that matters or not, “some cool shit” is what anyone who isn’t plagued by these anxieties wants art to be. And even just within the context of a museum visit, focusing on anything in the 21st century is like speed-dating.

Art shouldn’t be superficial. It honestly probably isn’t even art if it doesn’t get deeper and better the longer you spend with it. But it should be gratifying and appreciative of its viewership now more than ever. In a political time when it could be said that people are increasingly scared of being challenged, in all areas of their lives, whether thanks to Facebook algorithms or just some greater zeitgeist, what I’m getting at is a dangerous line of thought, for sure. But I think taking seriously people’s willingness to engage information will only benefit the future of art’s wider efficacy, and maybe ensure it even has that future in the first place. It’s important to connect to the culture you’re a part of, not just simply detach from or criticize it. Then influence is possible. Enjoyment will always be capitalized upon. That doesn’t mean it should be taken for granted.

Returning to 2001 (the movie) — which anecdotally is my personal favorite work of art — no one understood this better than Stanley Kubrick. His movies are immaculately shot. Basically perfect. But if you really think about it, what he did was almost like what people now call “edutainment,” a sort of high-art sacrilege. And yet, there’s no doubt that the way he works with the “material” of film, using something shiny to draw people into his world of ideas, is tactically smart, to say the least. I personally don’t mind admitting that I love to be edutained.

I wanted to talk about Obergfell’s sculpture at BMOCA, Go Home Bacchus, which seemed much farther down the continuum toward “critical” art, and learned that I kinda missed the mark in my interpretation. It’s not institutional critique, it’s again, a meditation. On monuments. They’re everywhere — huge, politically charged objects made by bureaucracies to celebrate victory, a kind of weird idea in the post-9/11 world, you might think, but apparently these sorts of idealistic, fascist colossuses are still a major export of North Korea for dictators worldwide. When New Orleans takes down their confederate monuments, as in current news, then how best to do that? Will they literally topple them? What an indulgent symbol…

And yet, for all this power these things are supposed to hold in the public spaces they reign over, its almost like the only way for people to react is to take a selfie in front of them, or else commit petty vandalism. It’s almost like instinctual in our culture, like it’s funny to vandalize a giant statue whether you care about the politics behind it or not.

Obergfell’s main piece of research for this project was the scene in Tim Burton’s Batman when Jack Nicholson’s Joker brings his gang in to supervillianize the art museum. “A really fucking cool scene,” representative of popular culture. But then also around that time ISIS began making headlines for destroying vast amounts of historical artifacts — horrifically seeming to say “we’re erasing your history in its most prized form, it’s gone, we own you.” So it turns out there is power in the act…

But Bacchus is about graffiti, not aesthetic genocide. But maybe not even graffiti, because that word is loaded and this has nothing to do with geometric, gradient murals. So a more slippery concept — slippery to the extent that Obergfell *might* not even be upset if someone was to tag the piece. Something racist: no-go. Some self-important graffiti writer trying to claim the piece and “get up” — get out. Junior WestSideMafia alternative school student? Go for it. The person who keeps writing “Kill Trump” on electrical boxes around Denver, please. Do your thing (endorsement is mine, not necessarily the artist’s).

Not to get redundant, but there’s something really charmingly normal about the shit-headed vibe of these sentiments, likened by Dmitri to a teenager stealing fire extinguishers to blow at cars in the parking lot for fun. And while that’s so juvenile and condemnable by the ultra-ethical art world, I know – is it not also kind of the most raw manifestation of The Artist’s Instinct, if such a thing exists? To just say “fuck it I’m gonna do this thing and see what happens”.

Why? “I just thought it’d be cool.”

[sosostudioconcepts]

PLACE Research Journal

Name: Carmen Argote (Los Angeles), Jaime Carrejo (Denver), Gabriel Dawe (Dallas), Claudio Dicochea (San Antonio), Daniela Edburg (San Miguel de Allende), Ana Teresa Fernández (San Francisco), Ramiro Gomez (West Hollywood), John Jota Leaños (San Francisco), Dmitri Obergfell (Denver), Ruben Ochoa (Los Angeles), Daisy Quezada (Santa Fe), and Xochi Solis (Austin).

Weblink: https://southwestcontemporary.com/mi-tierra-contemporary-artists-explore-place/ 

This work is an installation done by several latino artists in Denver, CO. It is called Mi Tierra. They had a goal of combining their experiences to depict what life is like in the contemporary west of the U.S. For the work they used tissue paper to craft sculptures, many of them being pinatas. For the artist’s one commented how it was a way for them to express themselves and their heritage in a fun way. They were inspired by other artists such as Frida Kahlo. I really enjoyed seeing this work and wish I could see it in person, since it is an installation, I hadn’t looked at work by multiple artists either, so it was nice looking at an example of a project taken a bit further than just one person could.

Name: Etel Adnan

Weblink: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/lists/8-contemporary-landscape-painters-pushing-the-genre-forward-56162 

This untitled work was done in 2016 by Etel Adnan, an Arab American author and artist. Etel describes her relationship with her writing compared to her artwork. Her goal is to depict the joy and emotion gained from viewing a scene by use of color and shape, using thick paint and a palette knife. She often writes poetry about the same scenes, which gives them a fun sort of “part 2” to the work if you know she has done one. I saw this work and was immediately drawn to it for the happy and bright, crisp colors. I was also a little surprised since I’ve seen so many highly detailed landscape works that honestly were very serene and relaxing to look at. I hadn’t realized how tiring searching for detail was until there is none to look for, just an image to enjoy and feel.

Name: Jess Franks

Weblink: https://www.minted.com/product/art/MIN-06D-GNA/cleft-for-me?art_group=art_print&artist_signature=unsigned&border=full_bleed&frame=natural&framing=framed&material=standard&quantity=1&size=24x18&utm_medium=sem&utm_source=google&utm_sub=pla&utm_campaign=G_S_Art_Fine_PLA_USA_SmartShopping&utm_custom_a=FineArt&utm_custom_b=feed&utm_custom_c=shopping&utm_int=b&utm_keyword&utm_device=a&AudId=pla-1653962092447&gclid=CjwKCAjw9LSSBhBsEiwAKtf0n8LQO9dPM54dlzP3kM1RJu2LJHQpFnc3cejyvLdJCE2A7qXUM1epOBoCxHQQAvD_BwE&color=A&shape= 

This artist doesn’t seem super well established, but I saw this work and was able to find who it was by. I couldn’t find a lot of background about the work, besides that the artist specializes in these colorful landscapes and sells them online as prints. I really love the way they chose to paint the landscape in a semi-abstract way as well. That and the colors make it very whimsical, and for me, seems to show how it feels to look at pretty scenery. I am curious what it is modeled after, if anything.

[paintingorsomething]

Dmitri Obergfell

At the End of the Day, Feel Some Type of Way, 2015

Chameleon Automotive Paint on Wood Panel, 36 x 52 inches

[i-dont-know-art]

The idea of infinity is just fascinating!!

I have started exploring it since 3D with the infinity box and it’s so exciting that I get to incorporate the idea into this block!!

https://www.booooooom.com/2012/12/11/infinite-ladder-by-dmitri-obergfell/

Infinity Ladder by Dmitri Obergfell

Obergfell’s works usually point people to the social construction debate and focus on the relationship between the self, culture and society. 

but I’m mostly drawn to Yayoi Kusama’s mirror works.

Yayoi Kusama, Ladder to Heaven (2019) in “Yayoi Kusama: Every Day I Pray for Love” at David Zwirner. 

[artisticstuffetc]

Art Blog Dmitri Obergfell. via Tumblr

[mimeticspace]

Dmitri Obergfell

[growingdenver]

Reviewed: Basquiat and Dmitri Obergfell (Closing), Six More Art Shows to See in Denver Now!

Reviewed: Basquiat and Dmitri Obergfell (Closing), Six More Art Shows to See in Denver Now!

It’s a perfect weekend to head to the galleries and see some art. Here are eight shows to see around town right now, including two that are closing. Continue Reading      

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: From William Blake Tattoos to Concrete Poetry, Art Books from Mexican Publishers

The Index Art Book Fair, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

Index Art Book Fair wrapped up its third year this past weekend, presenting 49 international publishers and their works. The crowd circulated steadily throughout the terrace of Museo Jumex, the contemporary art museum hosting the fair for the second consecutive year. This year, Index, which focuses on the work of independent and experimental publishers, had strong local representation, with 18 Mexican publishing houses setting the bar for technical precision in the art of bookmaking.

A select few stood out as further innovating what we may imagine as an art book, highlighting how the form of books informs their content. As Mexican conceptual artist and theorist Ulises Carrión once asserted, “A book is a series of spaces.” Here are five publishers from the fair that exemplify the scope of art books as objects, performance props, fetish pieces, and artworks in their own right.

*   *   *

Aeromoto’s lecture garden at the Index Art Book Fair, Museo Jumex

Aeromoto

At the entrance of the Index Art Book Fair was a lecture garden designed by Aeromoto, a library for contemporary art. The garden was host to artist readings throughout the festival, including a collaborative reading by Ricardo Pohlenz, a leading voice in contemporary Mexican poetry. He presented his book Backgammon, a collection of concrete poetry published by Gato Negro, which is just four years old but may be one of the most prolific independent publishers in Mexico City, with 90 unique titles bearing their stamp. Backgammon was passed around and the words of the poems were volleyed between audience members. Near the end, Pohlenz played his harmonica into the mic to accompany his piece.

Books at Mexico City-based Gato Negro’s booth at the Index Art Book Fair

Ediciones Hungría

Ediciones Hungría had a balanced display of artist books and works on paper. Until this year, this publishing house represented solely visual artists, and only Mexican ones. I noticed a book that was not a book, but a cover, a take on Ulises Carrión’s El Arte Nuevo de Hacer Libros (“The New Art of Making Books”), a self-reflexive piece on artists’ books written in 1975. Designed by Santiago de Silva in 2011, the cover unfolds into a large, single piece of paper, divided into many small boxes of text that expand upon and answer the question: “Qué es un libro?”, or “What is a book?”

Santiago de Silva’s take on Ulises Carrión’s El Arte Nuevo de Hacer Libros (“The New Art of Making Books”)

Ediciones Hungría’s table at the Index Art Book Fair

Fuck Zines Editorial

Fuck Zines started in 2010 as a digital zine library on Tumblr, and has been gaining momentum as an international network of artists since. In 2014, the digital project became a physical one, amassing printed books by the artists in their network. Fuck Zines is still primarily digital and borderless, though the books on display at the fair focused on a range of Mexican artists. One of the favorites was La multitud que he sido (“The Many that I Have Been”) by Santiago Solis, published by Mano de Papel, that turns an agenda into a visual diary, with scratched-out appointments and scratched-in faces for every day of the year. I was most drawn to the books of Conjuntivitis, aka Fuck Zines co-founder Paulina Morales, that contain precise, vinyl-ink silkscreens of dripping eyeballs and witchy nails.

A book from Conjuntivitis at the Fuck Zines booth

The Fuck Zines booth at the Index Art Book Fair

La multitud que he sido (“The Many that I Have Been”) by Santiago Solis at the Fuck Zines both

El Insulto

El Insulto is an archival project centered on works of and about the body. Their main focus is on erotics, and they approach books as fetish objects. The project has since expanded into a bookstore and publishing house. At the fair, El Insulto shared one of its favorite pieces with me: a copy of the Mexican pornographic magazine Bravo from the 1970s. Perusing the primarily vintage pornography and how-to fetish books, I almost missed a pile of humble-looking hand-drawn fanzines for William Blake. Bound with nail polish-painted wooden scraps and staples, the zines contain tattoo designs inspired by Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a collaboration between Trapos Press and Libros Caballo. The archive of El Insulto may be aptly described in Blake’s own words, “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”

Trapos Press and Libros Caballo’s fan zines for William Blake at El Insulto

El Insulto booth at the Index Art Book Fair

Casa Maauad

Casa Maauad came as a publishing house, but they didn’t bring any books. An artist-run residency program in the San Rafael neighborhood of Mexico City, the organization has turned to publishing art objects as a way to sustain its residency space. Sculptures made by the artists-in-residence are released in editions, and packaged in colorful wooden boxes. The graphic force of the display and the lack of literature seemed to intimidate some onlookers, who kept a distance of several feet before walking away. As I approached, I was greeted warmly and shown the function of one of the pieces, a graphite bust of Jesús Malverde, a Mexican Robin Hood-like “narco-saint,” by Dmitri Obergfell. The piece can be used by the owner to scrawl on the wall, unexpectedly transforming into a writing tool.

Dmitri Obergfell’s bust of Jesús Malverde at Casa Mauud

The Index Art Book Fair took place at Museo Jumex (Blvd. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Amp Granada, Mexico City) April 14–16.

The post From William Blake Tattoos to Concrete Poetry, Art Books from Mexican Publishers appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2pWtQXq via IFTTT

[aaagencyyy]

Dmitri Obergfell

[paricultures]

Dmitri Obergfell, Alessandro (Statues Also Die series), 2010′s © Dmitri Obergfell

[growingdenver]

Reviewed: Basquiat and Dmitri Obergfell (Closing), Six More Art Shows to See in Denver Now!

Reviewed: Basquiat and Dmitri Obergfell (Closing), Six More Art Shows to See in Denver Now!

It’s a perfect weekend to head to the galleries and see some art. Here are eight shows to see around town right now, including two that are closing. Continue Reading      

[iheartmyart]

Dmitri Obergfell

Artist Dmitri Obergfell synthesizes familiar art objects in sculptural form with everyday utilitarian items, such as bowling balls, ladders and nails, to raise questions about the way we attribute value to the objects that we surround ourselves with.

Apotheosis, Chameleon automotive paint, polycarbonate, graphite, plaster, 18" x 8" x 10", 2014

Cloud of Unknowing, St. Jude statue, chameleon automotive paint, bowling ball, 32" x 9" x 9", 2014

Four Kingdoms, Concrete, Bondo, quartz crystal, bowling ball, 36" x 12" x 12", 2012

Go Home Bacchus, You're Drunk, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art project rendering, 2014

Here, Ceramic, florescent light , 7" x 18" x 18", 2010

Kingdom of Ends, saw horses, mirror, candles, crystal candle sticks, wax, 48" x 40" x 24", 2013

Affinity Relic (Phaedo seires), Chameleon automotive paint on wood panel, 35" x 18", 2014

Infinite Ladder, Ladders, mirrors, 144" x 72" x 72", 2011

Barnum Caviar, Plaster and nail art, 12" x 8" x 8", 2014

Statues Also Die,  2013, images posted with permission of the artist. 

Website

______

Current Exhibitions: 

Now What, curated by Brett W. Schultz at Gildar Gallery, Denver, CO, June 11 - July 19, 2015

Thief Among Thieves at the MCA Denver, May 14 – June 28, 2015

Back to the Future at Casa Maauad, Mexico City, July 2 - July 30, 2015

______ Discover more art on: ♥ iheartmyart | facebook | twitter | instagram | flickr | mailing list | pinterest | soundcloud | Google +

Find more artwork by Dmitri Obergfell on iheartmyart. See more sculpture on iheartmyart. 

[e-stocado]

Dmitri Obergfell