[ART REVIEW]
“IT UPENDED EVERYTHING I SUSPECTED ABOUT THE KIND OF PERSON WHO WOULD DO THIS.”
PHYSICAL GRAFFITI {BY PHILIP ANSELMO}
INFO@PGHCITYPAPER.COM
2013 CARNEGIE INTERNATIONAL continues through March 16. Carnegie Museum of Art, 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. 412-622-3131 or www.cmoa.org
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[BOOK]
RECONCILIATIONS {{BY BY NICK KEPPLER}
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Rokni Haerizadeh’s “Reign of Winter”
Dozens of drawings and a pair of animations by Iranian artist Rokni Haerizadeh join the contemporary art at the 2013 Carnegie International. The exhibit is the first in the U.S. for Haerizadeh, who lives and works in Dubai in exile from his native Tehran. Most basically, Haerizadeh’s artistic practice consists of transforming reprints of media images by drawing over portions of the original. His genius lies in his ability to pick up on latent tendencies in the images and pursue their unseen trajectories. However absurd his interventions may seem, the grotesque additions never violate the logic of the original compositions. Rather than sublimate, Haerizadeh lets the instincts out, and it’s these forces, unchecked, that guide his brush: contorting faces, lopping off heads or morphing people into furniture or animals. Haerizadeh’s drawings are parasitic without preference for genre or medium. Scenes of civil unrest or political patronage get juxtaposed with snapshots from a wedding album. All is ceremony and subject to the same atavisms. His gestural figures colonize their host texts and pervert the original images, even as they expose the fallacy of the authentic. His “sketchbook” — fittingly perched above the museum’s Grand Staircase — is an already-published, illustrated history of 2011’s British royal wedding that Haerizadeh recasts as an orgiastic assembly of animals, costumed phalli and headless bodies. The debauchery and paganism once allied with ritual rise to the surface in a work that supplants the banality of picturebook desire in favor of the artist’s more fertile and animistic visions. Haerizadeh’s talent for liberating the repressed is most explicit in the two videos, each composed of thousands of individual hand-drawn frames. Once animated, his figures invade the conventional space of the filmed scene. In coils of ink and gesso, they consume their hosts or — in the case of a news broadcaster — spew like nightmares from their heads. In silence, the footage proceeds like a reverse exorcism, as if the demons had been persuaded to reinhabit the bodies, to exhibit the convulsions of their bastard forms. Yet Haerizadeh operates at a level that confounds any effort at a consonant affective reading. We can never with any certainty say whether the imagery disgusts or arouses, makes us hungry or sick — and it’s this ability to provoke such weird ambivalences that make these works so worth our attention.
N JULY 31, 2002, a Hamas operative placed a suitcase bomb in a cafeteria in Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, killing nine people. The location was chosen because of the school’s population of American students. David HarrisGershon and his wife, Jamie, were two such students. Jamie suffered burns and shrapnel wounds but survived. David wasn’t in the cafeteria at the time, but afterward experienced anxiety and insomnia that psychotherapy could not relieve. Desperate and inspired by South Africa’s post-apartheid reconciliation process, he took the unusual measure of returning to Jerusalem to meet the family of the bomber. Now a writer, speaker and privateschool teacher who lives in Squirrel Hill, he recounts the process in the new memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? (Oneworld Publications). Harris-Gershon — who also won last year’s Moth GrandSLAM storytelling contest — recently spoke with CP.
YOU ADMIT THERE ARE GAPS IN YOUR OWN MEMORIES OF THAT TIME. HOW DID THAT AFFECT YOUR APPROACH TO WRITING? I tried to recall everything as best I could. From the moment I saw my wife in the emergency room, I emotionally shut down. Admittedly, there are things that are hazy from everything being surreal and the traumatic impact. I was trying to deal with the aftereffects, the PTSD symptoms, when I came back to the States. One of the things I was required to do in therapy was reconstruct every memory I had. While, psychologically, those methods didn’t really help, they did reconstruct the chronology.
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 01.08/01.15.2014
{PHOTO BY TERRY CLARK}
David D Dav id H Harris-Gershon arris i Gersh hon