Gagosian – Delphian Gallery

Articles Tagged with: gagosian

Jerry Gogosian – art world satirist and illusive commentator

Jerry Gogosian is the self-styled “TMZ of the art world” Instagram account. It’s creator is anonymous, and much speculation surrounds the account.
No art-world figure is beyond satire, and the account pokes fun at everyone from collectors and dealers, to artists and gallerists. I decided to find out more, so we had a little chat…

Benjamin Murphy – How anonymous is your identity, and is it anonymous out of self-preservation?
I’d imagine you upset a few thin-skinned people from time to time.

Jerry Gogosian – I keep telling people that the identity behind Jerry Gogosian is the least important part of this project. Of course (and for the first time) I’ve got haters…why I’m not really so sure. They insist on speculating about my identity and “outing” or “cancelling” me, but ultimately they matter so very little to me. I started this account for my own personal satisfaction and a way to blow-off steam. This was never meant to get as big as it did.

BM – Yeah I get that, ultimately it’s not about you. Perhaps the hate is coming from people who take themselves much too seriously?

JG – I think the hate comes from people who are personally and professionally frustrated. Ironically, the higher up on the food chain the subjects of my jokes tend to be, the less they seem to care themselves and will usually play along with the joke. Last week I made a joke about Marc Glimcher of PACE. He loved it and played along in the comments section.

BM – Thats great. I think across all walks of life, those that are the most afraid of critique are those that are the least comfortable in themselves, and least confident in what they’re doing.

JG – Yeah…
Art is deadly serious, but the Vanity Fair behind it is hilarious. That’s truly where the jokes are directed.

BM – I think there is a lot of “The Emperors New Clothes” in the art world, and people are perhaps afraid of being called out on their bullshit, or, people are afraid of being labeled as being a bullshitter when they aren’t one.

JG – Maybe this is cruel sounding but I don’t really worry about the psychological make up of those kinds of people. People in general can have a lot of fear, I acknowledge that. If I sat around and worried about insecure people, I’d be insecure.

BM – Good choice of words – I think those that can’t take a joke are the insecure ones.
I suppose what I’m getting at, is do you think that people in the art world are less willing to be satirised?

JG – No they love it. People dm me asking me to make jokes about them…

BM – Oh that’s good, that’s not what I, and I’d imagine many others, would have expected.

JG – Well I make relatable character profiles that a lot of people see themselves reflected in.

BM – Maybe its validation in a way, being significant enough to have jokes made about you.

JG – Yeah in the beginning some other artworld meme pages were giving me a hard time, and then someone was like, if they aren’t talking about you, then you’re not doing a good enough job.

‪BM – Exactly‬‬.‬

‪JG – So I don’t really let it bother me and neither should it bother anyone else. ‬‬‬

‪Memes are mostly throw-away entertainment anyway. HOT today. Gone tomorrow.‬‬‬

jerry gogosian

BM – So did you start the page out of some kind of frustration with the art world – is this a way of you taking people down a peg or two‬‬, or is it much less malevolent?‬‬

JG – I don’t think of it as a take down… maybe just a hot take on the art world.
It has turned into a community at this point with high net followers and young emerging artists with everything in between.

BM – That’s nice. I think the world needs satire now more than ever.

JG – We need to laugh, right?

BM – And we need to be able to laugh at ourselves.

JG – Yeah it is healthy. When I started this, I just assumed it was already happening.

jerry gogosian

BM – In a wider sense, do you think people are less willing to be satirised, less willing to be disagreed with, and less willing to be offended than ever before?
It seems like no-one is willing to listen to opinions that conflict with their own anymore.

JG – We live in a culture addicted to outrage. Period.
I do not operate in that realm.

BM – That outrage only serves to shut down debate, and keep people all the more separate.
I think if people were a lot less quick to offend, a lot of the political strife that the EU and America find themselves in would be less extreme.

JG – We live in rough times, but I think we’ve lost something…the notion of love in our daily vernacular. I’m not talking about “OMG I love you” bullshit but rather practicing love and compassion towards those around us on a daily basis.

BM – Even to those whom we completely disagree with.

JG – In that sense I am a Christian (omfg Jerry Gogosian is a CHRISTIAN)

I just like what Jesus taught.

BM – As a philosopher he was great.

JG – We lack a redemptive allowance in our culture for people to make mistakes, instead these media outrage cycles tear the person down and leave them in the dust. I do not believe in this.

BM – Yeah, and if you approach people in an aggressive way you just put them on the defensive, and then there’s no way you can change their opinion.

JG – And you underline that YOU are THEIR enemy, it doesn’t work.

‪ ‬ jerry gogosian
BM – Why is art valuable?‬‬

JG – Because it is the sacred expression of a life lived and reflected through the moment in which it passed. My favorite teacher once said “art is the one place where there are zero laws”‬‬

‪Science is rules and laws that you work with and within.

BM – That’s very liberating‬‬.

‪JG – And in terms of education, yes, learning and understanding history are essential, but the other component that cannot be intellectually taught, only emotionally learned is that we are completely free to create. ‬‬‬

‪BM – Perhaps that’s why certain people become artists; it attracts rule breakers because there are no rules‬‬.‬
That’s probably why I became interested in it in the first place.‬‬

So if you could give one piece of advice to someone at the very start of their art journeys, what would that be?‬‬

‪JG – Go to business school. Become a nurse. Become a teacher. Get a hard skill that you can fall back on when shit gets hard‬. ‬
‪An career cannot be plotted like a doctor’s career…‬‬‬

‪You’ve got to be ready to endure some extreme hardship. ‬‬‬

jerry gogosian

For more interviews:

Diabolical – Valerie Savchits

For more by Jerry Gogosian

Instagram

Dormant Chaos – Chris Burden at Gagosian

Dormant Chaos – Chris Burden at Gagosian by Benjamin Murphy

(Originally published in AfterNyne Magazine)

Chris Burden - Gagosian

In their latest show, Gagosian gallery is isolating two works from Chris Burden’s retrospective at New Museum in New York in 2013, and presenting them together in their Brittania Street gallery. Entitled Measured, the show speaks of symmetry, bringing together two works that exist via the equality of weight between two opposing objects. In Porsche With Meteorite, a genuine nickel-iron meteorite counterbalances a restored Porsche 914.

This work is one which suggests immense, and yet dormant, power. The power of the sports-car is curtailed and it is left sitting idly, as if weightless, whilst the meteorite sits cold upon the opposing end of the fulcrums arm. These two objects have had past lives that were incredibly high-octane, for Burden’s restoration of a vintage car rather than the selection of a showroom floor model is not merely serendipitous. These objects have been imbued with an immense power, which through his transfiguration, have become impotent in their stillness. They seem to have lost their virility, and sit immobile, suspended in time.

The meteorite is only twenty percent of the weight of the car, and for this reason the beam that supports both is much longer on the meteorites end. It is a purpose-built structure that towers overhead, telescopic – although the lack of registration-marks on the uniform oxidisation suggests that this functionality is only for show; it has potential, but this potential will never be actualised. The vehicles have been painstakingly restored to their former perfection, whilst the oxidised steel components, display an artificial history that in the vehicles js genuine, but obscured.

The viewer is at once struck with the delicacy of the work, and yet feels insecure in the potential for danger. In many ways both works in Measuredare redolent of his 1996 work The Flying Steamroller, in which a twelve-tonne steamroller is attached to a pivoted arm, counterbalanced on the opposite side. In the middle of the arm, there is a rotating fulcrum that allows the steamroller to lift off the ground and float in the air once it has reached a high enough velocity for the counterweight to elevate it. In this work the potential for unmitigated disaster is very real, and it is impossible to not be struck by the delicacy with which this immensely dangerous event is taking place. The steamroller glides serenely through the air like a bird.

Chris Burden - Gagosian

The other work in the show, One-Ton Crane Truck is a refurbished Ford truck counterbalanced with a purpose-built single tonne cube, which contrasts with and exemplifies the exotic nature of the meteorite. In this work, the vehicle is a rudimentary machine used for laborious work, which is diametrically opposed to the extravagent sports-car in the other room. This juxtaposition of the functional and familiar robustness of the crane truck and cube, with the exoticsports car and meteorite, seems to highlight the intrinsic qualities of each by playing them off against one another. The sports car appears all the more luxurious and fast, whilst the truck speaks of rigidity and strength. This piece is slightly less successful than its counterpart however, and as was suggested to me by a friend, a bit ‘cartoony’. The one-tonne weight is a rather arbritrary measurement, as the trucks front wheels are planted firmly on the ground. Were they to be lifted ever-so-slightly off the floor, the work would have been immeasurably powerful, but alas, that is not the case. Having the counterweight a purpose-built cube, as opposed to a magical, extra-terrestrial chunk of metal, diminishes this work somewhat. It does however, suggest that this work means something different to its opposite, in that here the work suggests industry and industrialization, grounded in the real, laborious world. The other has a magical, almost fairytale quality, and is suggestive of some kind of freedom (or its lack thereof). It is not that either work critiques or diminishes the other, rather that they both speak of similar ideas, in opposing ways.

Burden’s early work was chaotic and reckless, but never haphazard. There was a raw energy and freedom to his performance works that now, because of his untimely death, will never be seen again. This show has a somber quietness to it, that when viewed after the artist’s premature death, screams of lost potential. The cars potential as a conduit to immense power and freedom is left suspended, and isolated from the very ground that gives it its meaning. In this however, it is imbued it with a newer, more abstract power. The meteorite appears as if lassoed out of the sky, hung upon a metal gallows and displayed in all its impotence, energy lost irretrievably.

In Burden’s earlier work, he put himself at great physical danger and exposed himself to actual bodily harm for his works.Towards the end of his career, he made works that placed the viewer in arenas of potential danger, with The Big Wheel and Steamroller, where there always seemed that chaos was ready to break free. In these works presented in Measured, the chaos and energy that could ensue has long passed, and now lays dormant within these objects, perfectly suspended to reflect that an equilibrium has been reached between chaos and calm. The gallery has a stillness that heightens the balance of the two works, both individually with the literal balance between objects, but also the way in which both works discourse with each other.

As Mark Rothko once said, “complete equilibrium is death”, and within these works, it is the perfect symmetry of both that each nullifies the power of its opposite. All ordered systems strive towards chaos, and these equal and opposing forces arrest this eagerness for disorder, creating a stunted equilibrium redolent of serenity. It is a stale serenity however, as each work calls to mind a lost potential, which when read in the post-Burden landscape, echoes of loss.

For more by Benjamin:

Santiago Sierra – The Strangeness of Reality

For more details about the show:

Gagosian Website

Chris Burden at Gagosian

Chris Burden sadly died in 2015, but this weekend his posthumous show Measured opens at Gagosian. We at Delphian Gallery are very excited about the show!

September 29, 2018–January 26, 2019
Britannia Street, London

“Limits” is a relative term. Like beauty, it is often in the eye of the beholder.
—Chris Burden

Gagosian is pleased to present Measured, an exhibition of two large-scale works by Chris Burden: 1 Ton Crane Truck (2009) and Porsche with Meteorite (2013).

Measured - Chris Burden -Gagosian

With a series of startling actions in the early 1970s, Burden challenged his own mental and physical limitations, and with them the boundaries of art and performance. Shut inside a locker for five days (Five Day Locker Piece, 1971), shot in the arm (Shoot, 1971), and nailed through the palms of his hands to the roof of his Volkswagen (Trans-fixed, 1974), he sought to reflect the violence that defined American politics, society, and media. Over the course of his career, the daring spirit of these early performances evolved into compelling large-scale sculptures that embody technical feats on an imposing scale. Burden used toys (figurines, train sets, Erector parts) as the building blocks for expansive scale models of skyscrapers, dystopic cities, and battlefields; conversely, he deployed actual vehicles (ships, trucks, and cars) in surreal and gravity-defying ways.

At the Britannia Street galleries, a functional 1964 F350 Ford crane-truck is held in balance with the weight of a one-ton cast-iron cube, and a Porsche 914 sports car is suspended in equilibrium with a meteorite. Both vehicles have been restored to pristine condition using contemporary materials, from fresh paint to new tires. In 1 Ton Crane Truck, the Ford is painted bright orange and the custom-made cube suspended from its crane boom announces its weight—“1 TON”—in recessed lettering, forcing the viewer to consider the physical capacities of the familiar American vehicle.

Burden pushed this precarious sense of balance even further in Porsche with Meteorite. Like a giant seesaw, a yellow Porsche and a nickel-iron meteorite hang from either end of a steel beam. The fulcrum, placed off-center, distributes the weight so that both objects are raised from the floor. The Porsche, at 993.4 kilograms (2,190 lbs.), weighs down the short end of the beam, and the meteorite, at 176.9 kilograms (390 lbs.), counterbalances it on the long end. Porsche with Meteorite thus draws attention to the relativity of size, weight, and value, juxtaposing refined German manufacture with an extraterrestrial metal chunk.

Measured - Chris Burden -Gagosian

September 29, 2018–January 26, 2019 Britannia Street, London

September 29, 2018–January 26, 2019
Britannia Street, London