Cheekwood Museum of the Arts, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
2008
David Maddox
Question Authority
Cheekwood features two artists taking on the tyrants
Glexis Novoa: Landscape of events
Yvonne Buchheim: Song Archive Project
We usually confront marble from a distance, either cladding public buildings or as the material for statues of historical, mythological or religious figures. At Cheekwood's Temporary Contemporary gallery, marble takes on a more intimate role as a surface for delicate graphite drawings of fantastic spaces. In "Pinnacle," a long piece of marble is mounted perpendicular to the wall, its thinnest edge decorated with a landscape of towers and spires. The drawing squeezes height and depth into the smallest space available, like the backgrounds in Renaissance paintings or Charles Simmonds' miniature clay cities tucked into unexpected parts of a museum building.
These architectural fantasies were created by Glexis Novoa, a Cuban‐born artist who emigrated as an adult to the U.S. The exhibit just happens to be situated next to video pieces by Yvonne Buchheim, born in East Germany during the years of Socialist rule. Both artists take an understandable interest in authority, and the juxtaposition provides a unexpected chance to compare what the two have to say about it.
Most of Novoa's drawings in this show depict imaginary landscapes scattered with monuments of bygone or senescent regimes—Saddam's Iraq, the USSR, North Korea, ancient Egypt, Cuba. The Catholic Church also finds its way in there, and emblems of contemporary Western society like the Mercedes Benz logo and an American stealth fighter show up. The scenes contain some futuristic elements, like electronic eyes that evoke a nightmare surveillance state.
The marble itself serves as a direct reference to the architecture and monuments of regimes that throw up miles of the stone to impress and cow the populace, rivals and outside observers. It also gives the works nice detail structure, as the images incorporate the veins, cavities and crystalline structures in the stone.
Novoa cooks up an apocalyptic utopianism with the collections of monuments and mysterious contraptions he imagines. Jumbled together in desolate wastelands, sand piling up at their base, these scenes present the heroic statues in a state of defeat and decay. In essence, he's picturing a world in which every one of these authorities has entered the dustbin of history. He's done so with high‐level graffiti, drawing on stone that could be part of a municipal building's walls. That Novoa chafes at authority becomes clear in the exhibit's one video piece. It's a sequence of words that starts off with the phrase, "I'm a Cuban, but," followed by a series of qualifying statements that put all sorts of adjectives before the word Cuban. The modifiers run from quality descriptors like "outstanding," "noble" and "cool" to religions, ethnicity and nationality. He gives you Christian and Muslim Cubans, Hispanic and African Cubans, and even Venezuelan and Chilean Cubans. The list seems endless, and it ends gleefully with the exclamation, "A real Cuban!" Words and names possess authority, and no doubt people believe that applying the word "Cuban" to someone says something certain about them. Novoa blows that up by linking the word with so many others that it takes on impossible variety.
Yvonne Buchheim's videos at Cheekwood revolve around ordinary people singing. She has one delightful and daft piece where people in Britain sing songs of their choosing at their place of work or elsewhere, juxtaposed with pictures and sounds of the street outside the person's location. Another gets people in Nashville to sing something for the camera. Her work connects most clearly with Novoa in the piece exhibited directly next to the Temporary Contemporary room, "My Thoughts Are Free." This video shows Buchheim herself in various places in Tehran, Iran, during a residency there, her head covered as required, singing the old German song "Die Gedanken Sind Frei." It's a song of resistance from the early 19th century about the idea that thoughts are free and no one can control them, no matter what other power they may have. The song makes the residual claim of resistance and individual autonomy in the face of even the most pervasive and oppressive authority. That sentiment runs against regimes like the Iranian clerics, and Buchheim performs her song quietly, in some shots looking around nervously as if she's afraid security officers will haul her in. She recaptures the sense of risk that Europeans might have had singing this song, say, in the days after the revolutions of 1848. It should remind us that such an atmosphere could return with a couple of quick wrong moves in our social and political order.
Novoa creates imaginary worlds where the tyrants have all been swept away, and hopefully points out how the monument‐ makers inevitably end up abandoned. Buchheim's video creates a stronger sense of the danger authority poses. Taken together, the artists make a good case for anarchy, as a source of pleasure and an antidote to its opposite.
2008
David Maddox
Question Authority
Cheekwood features two artists taking on the tyrants
Glexis Novoa: Landscape of events
Yvonne Buchheim: Song Archive Project
We usually confront marble from a distance, either cladding public buildings or as the material for statues of historical, mythological or religious figures. At Cheekwood's Temporary Contemporary gallery, marble takes on a more intimate role as a surface for delicate graphite drawings of fantastic spaces. In "Pinnacle," a long piece of marble is mounted perpendicular to the wall, its thinnest edge decorated with a landscape of towers and spires. The drawing squeezes height and depth into the smallest space available, like the backgrounds in Renaissance paintings or Charles Simmonds' miniature clay cities tucked into unexpected parts of a museum building.
These architectural fantasies were created by Glexis Novoa, a Cuban‐born artist who emigrated as an adult to the U.S. The exhibit just happens to be situated next to video pieces by Yvonne Buchheim, born in East Germany during the years of Socialist rule. Both artists take an understandable interest in authority, and the juxtaposition provides a unexpected chance to compare what the two have to say about it.
Most of Novoa's drawings in this show depict imaginary landscapes scattered with monuments of bygone or senescent regimes—Saddam's Iraq, the USSR, North Korea, ancient Egypt, Cuba. The Catholic Church also finds its way in there, and emblems of contemporary Western society like the Mercedes Benz logo and an American stealth fighter show up. The scenes contain some futuristic elements, like electronic eyes that evoke a nightmare surveillance state.
The marble itself serves as a direct reference to the architecture and monuments of regimes that throw up miles of the stone to impress and cow the populace, rivals and outside observers. It also gives the works nice detail structure, as the images incorporate the veins, cavities and crystalline structures in the stone.
Novoa cooks up an apocalyptic utopianism with the collections of monuments and mysterious contraptions he imagines. Jumbled together in desolate wastelands, sand piling up at their base, these scenes present the heroic statues in a state of defeat and decay. In essence, he's picturing a world in which every one of these authorities has entered the dustbin of history. He's done so with high‐level graffiti, drawing on stone that could be part of a municipal building's walls. That Novoa chafes at authority becomes clear in the exhibit's one video piece. It's a sequence of words that starts off with the phrase, "I'm a Cuban, but," followed by a series of qualifying statements that put all sorts of adjectives before the word Cuban. The modifiers run from quality descriptors like "outstanding," "noble" and "cool" to religions, ethnicity and nationality. He gives you Christian and Muslim Cubans, Hispanic and African Cubans, and even Venezuelan and Chilean Cubans. The list seems endless, and it ends gleefully with the exclamation, "A real Cuban!" Words and names possess authority, and no doubt people believe that applying the word "Cuban" to someone says something certain about them. Novoa blows that up by linking the word with so many others that it takes on impossible variety.
Yvonne Buchheim's videos at Cheekwood revolve around ordinary people singing. She has one delightful and daft piece where people in Britain sing songs of their choosing at their place of work or elsewhere, juxtaposed with pictures and sounds of the street outside the person's location. Another gets people in Nashville to sing something for the camera. Her work connects most clearly with Novoa in the piece exhibited directly next to the Temporary Contemporary room, "My Thoughts Are Free." This video shows Buchheim herself in various places in Tehran, Iran, during a residency there, her head covered as required, singing the old German song "Die Gedanken Sind Frei." It's a song of resistance from the early 19th century about the idea that thoughts are free and no one can control them, no matter what other power they may have. The song makes the residual claim of resistance and individual autonomy in the face of even the most pervasive and oppressive authority. That sentiment runs against regimes like the Iranian clerics, and Buchheim performs her song quietly, in some shots looking around nervously as if she's afraid security officers will haul her in. She recaptures the sense of risk that Europeans might have had singing this song, say, in the days after the revolutions of 1848. It should remind us that such an atmosphere could return with a couple of quick wrong moves in our social and political order.
Novoa creates imaginary worlds where the tyrants have all been swept away, and hopefully points out how the monument‐ makers inevitably end up abandoned. Buchheim's video creates a stronger sense of the danger authority poses. Taken together, the artists make a good case for anarchy, as a source of pleasure and an antidote to its opposite.
