Yahav-Brown offers art that will make you laugh
By David Bonetti
POST-DISPATCH VISUAL ARTS CRITIC
Wednesday, Mar. 15 2006
The lying liars Danny
Yahav-Brown exposes in this hilarious exhibition are not
the
right-wing politicians Al Franken lacerated in his hilarious book, and the
lies they tell have nothing to do with fictive weapons of mass
destruction.
Yahav-Brown, a conceptual artist, seems to be proposing
that artists are in
fact lying liars and that the lies they tell are
the objects they create: art.
But of course. We have long since
given up expecting art to tell the literal
truth - just as we have
given up on art as a delivery system for beauty.
Deconstructionists
have gone out of their way to show us that the most
convincing realism
is a fiction composed of a set of unquestioned conventions.
Truth lies
in the unmasking. And burlesque, satire, crude humor and
intellectual
pranks are among the techniques used to find the real truth
beneath
surface appearance.
Yahav-Brown uses those techniques and more
-punning, adolescent sexual humor,
slapstick, reversal and outright
stealing.
Not to leave out lying. In "All the Lies I Have Ever
Told," Yahav-Brown covers
a sheet of typewriter paper with the title
phrase, suggesting that the list is
endless. Done, he shapes the sheet
into a paper airplane and sticks it into the
gallery wall, making it
look as if the sheet was so sharp that it pierced the
wall. Of course,
it also suggests that the artist who confesses his sins of
prevarication is not really bothered by it at all - having confessed,
he throws
it away.
Yahav-Brown's destabilization of
expectations turns into high gear with the
gallery's front desk: a
white, drawerless modernist table. He has taken off a
pair of legs,
creating an image that suggests that the table has suddenly
collapsed.
The wine bottles of his opening and the announcements for his show
lie
in a wine puddle (made of epoxy) on the floor.
One of his
naughtiest pieces is a pair of identical color photographs hung on
facing walls. The large images focus on the crotch of a person wearing
a pair
of jeans. Out of each zipper dangles a finger. Expectations are
upset. And
outrage and surprise give way to the pleasure that comes
from experiencing a
fresh visual wit.
The funniest piece in
this funny show is the video "The Way Things Go
(Backwards)." The
neo-dada Swiss team Fischli & Weiss made an extremely funny
video
some 20 years ago titled "The Way Things Go." In this half-hour of
controlled mayhem, ordinary objects - pails, wheels, screens, balls -
are set
up in elaborate sequences so that once an action has been
initiated at one end,
its unbroken chain reaction continues through to
the other. Yahav-Brown has run
Fischli & Weiss' video backward,
and, it may be even funnier in reverse.
Yahav-Brown's exhibition
continues only through Saturday, so make an effort to
see it: You
might get a laugh or two as a reward.
Leora
Laor
Yahav-Brown was born and raised in Israel, but his work
isn't identifiably
"Israeli." Israeli photographer Leora Laor lives in
Jerusalem, and her subjects
are Israeli, so that makes her work
literally "Israeli," although her
intentions - to document a
lifestyle, to create timeless imagery out of daily
life - are the
intentions of artists who live in many places.
Her new work shows a
romantic sensibility, filtered through post-modernist
distancing
effects, that is mature in its vision and realization.
In one body
of work, Laor made still images of people in a public park in
Jerusalem that she had clandestinely taped on digital video. The small
figures,
photographed from a great distance, possess the timeless
quality of people from
biblical stories. The golden light suggests
Italian cinema from the postwar
period, and the figures seem to be
occupying stage sets. One image of four
women in long dresses is
reminiscent of paintings by French Barbizon painter
Millet.
In
her other series of digital photographs, Laor again takes pictures of
unsuspecting people. This time her subjects are Orthodox Jewish women,
who in
their long dresses and scarves look as if they are from another
age. In one
print, a girl with friends looks back toward the
photographer, catching her at
her game. The girl looks unsettled, but
she offers no menace.
'Danny Yahav-Brown: Lies, and the Lying Liars
Who Tell Them'
Where: William Shearburn Gallery, 4735
McPherson Avenue
When: Through Saturday
Hours:
11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday
How much:
free
More info: 314-367-8020 or
ww.shearburngallery.com
Leora Laor
Where: Ellen
Curlee Gallery, 1308A Washington Avenue
When: Through March
30.
Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through
Saturday
How much: free
More info:
314-241-1299 or ww.ellencurleegallery.com
|