Official press release info:
Deitch Projects is pleased to present one of the year's most anticipated exhibitions, X-STaTIC PRO=CeSS, a collaboration between Madonna and Steven Klein. The work explores a new space between still and moving images. Three video works and two photographic animations, each with a sound component are projected into the suspended hollow volumes of LOT/EK's exhibition design. Two of the sound compositions incorporate vocals by Madonna. [note - the vocals feature totally "acapella" versions of her song "X-Static Process" and "The Beast Within"].
Madonna presents herself as "a performer in a landscape where she creates and brings her ideas to life or death." Steven Klein's intention was to work with Madonna as a performance artist, creating a situation where she could respond directly to the camera without constraint. The project is not about photography of celebrity, but about the person and the passions beneath the surface. Klein sees Madonna as a messenger, asking people to wake up and confront the dehumanizing forces in the contemporary world.
Rather than the packaged glamour that one might expect from the collaboration of a pop star and a top fashion photographer, the work is raw and menacing. The spirit is apocalyptic. Madonna and Steven Klein enter into a subconscious realm of primitive fears and desires. The work has a religious passion and a sexual charge. The theatricality increases with the intensity of the emotions.
Klein has extended the concentrated power of the still photograph into a moving image. Fusing photography, video, and animation, he has expanded the medium to capture Madonna's energized performance. In developing their exhibition design, the architects Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano of LOT/EK, viewed Madonna and Klein's work as "contemporary Caravaggio paintings," suspended on the edge between still and moving image. They want the experience of the work to be evocative of wandering through an Italian baroque church, where one is captivated by the large magically lit paintings that fill the walls of side chapels.
Steven Klein is one of the most prominent photographers of his generation. He is a regular contributor to Vogue, Vogue Italia, and W. His photographs of the writer J.T. Leroy were exhibited at Deitch Projects in February of 2002.
Architects Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano of LOT/EK designed the exhibition. Their work blurs the boundaries between art, architecture, and entertianment. LOT/EK's TV Tank was presented at Deitch Projects in 1998.
Deitch Projects has been an active participant in the new convergence of art, music, performance, fashion, and design.
The April issue of W features a 44-page portfolio of Madonna and Steven Klein's photographic collaboration.
Gallery hours are 12pm to 6pm, Tuesday through Saturday. For additional information, contact Julia Chiang at 212-343-7300.
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MY COMMENTS:
I visited this exhibit on Thursday April 24th, just before I came home from the New York "American Life" activities and festivities. I must say, it was NOTHING like I had expected. The exhibit was dark, strange, and sort of creepy. There wasn't really much to see - basically four displays (referred to as "installations") featuring Madonna images projected onto the back of a large wooden box that was lined with acoustic insulation foam. According to one web site I saw, the installations are actually available for sale, and range in price from $35,000 to $65,000.
It was strange to hear totally acapella samples of Madonna's vocals from "X-Static Process" and "The Beast Within," layered beneath strange, dark, gurgly, bleepy sounds.
On
display in the exhibit is Steven Klein's book "X-STaTIC PRO=CeSS"
which is a book filled with images of Madonna. Some of the photos
in this book are totally exclusive to the book; but they are all
similar to the photos taken from the April 2003 issue of W magazine.
The pages of the book (as well as the front and back covers) are
made of a cheap paper material that's a cross between tissue paper
and paper towels. I'd have to say that the book is rather poor
quality, especially since it costs a whopping $350.00. Only 1,000
copies of the book were printed. It's still too early to predict
if this book will end up on eBay for $5.00, or if it will become
one of the most valuable Madonna collectibles ever, possibly fetching
$1,000 or more in a few years.
Although the exhibit was unique and somewhat interesting, it was not an "impressive instant" for me.
Because they
have to work with teams of models, makeup artists, hairdressers,
set designers, stylists, magazine editors, retouchers, and a posse
of assistants, fashion photographers are not unlike film directors.
And like directors, many of them are hacks, turning out reliably
glossy, vacuously glamorous schlock month after month, but the
best are genuine auteurs-artists who use the collaborative process
to realize their own personal vision. If Beaton, Horst, Avedon,
Penn, and Newton virtually define the pantheon, and Steven Meisel
was inducted into its ranks years ago (his Linda Evangelista covers
for Italian Vogue were the clincher), Steven Klein is its
most accomplished and idiosyncratic new member. His collaboration
with Madonna-including 44 pages in the April W, a massive
video installation at Deitch Projects, and a fat, limited-edition
artist's book masquerading as that show's catalog-is the capper
to several years' worth of drop-dead audacious magazine spreads,
covers, and ad campaigns that have made Klein fashion photography's
auteur of the moment.
"It's my world and the world beneath the surface," Klein says when asked to describe the atmosphere he conjures up for his most memorable photo shoots. "Everything that is and isn't." Klein's world is not unrelievedly dark, but the images that define him (like his fall 2002 campaigns for Alexander McQueen and D Squared) often seem to emerge from the unconscious and are set in a desolate, claustrophobic underworld-a place at once sinister and seductive. "I'm always looking for the ordinary, the generic, the ambiguous place," he says. "Something that doesn't fit into any time or place. I think of my spaces as gray spaces, neutral spaces that allow things to emerge."
Before Klein brought Madonna into one of these spaces, for one 10-hour session last August in L.A., they exchanged e-mails and images for several months. Although he'd already done tough, sexy, and brilliantly iconoclastic spreads with Brad Pitt, David Beckham, and Justin Timberlake, Klein was understandably intimidated by Madonna. What can you do with a notoriously been-there, done-that chameleon? Their exchange reassured him: "Her premise is that sometimes not knowing what to do is a good place to start." Early on, Klein had approached Wwith the project, knowing that its adventurous creative director, Dennis Freedman, would give him the freedom (and, later, the gatefold pages) he needed. But because Madonna made it clear from the beginning that she wasn't interested in doing another fashion spread ("If I don't feel like I'm creating something that means something," she told W's Merle Ginsberg, "I don't want to do it"), the exchange quickly focused on the idea of a performance, with the shoot imagined as a rehearsal, a peek backstage. "I always saw her more as a performance artist, anyway," Klein says. "She started talking about how the final product is always disappointing, how sometimes the perfected performance no longer has the energy that the process originally had."
It will surprise no one that in the resulting photographs, Madonna is wearing Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche leather boots, Prada tap pants, a Dolce & Gabbana silk corset, and several lavishly ornamented Christian Lacroix Couture pieces, including a beaded face covering that the Daily News mistook for a gas mask. But even in the pages of Wno one will mistake this for a fashion shoot. In one of that magazine's panoramic double gatefolds, the masked Madonna kneels, one leg outstretched, on a bare stage in what looks like a factory space, raw save for several panels of sheer curtains behind her. On the concrete floor nearby, a coyote strains at its leash, while a little further off a burning wedding dress, already half-consumed, sends flames high into the air. (Klein acknowledges "revisiting," sometimes unintentionally, several key Madonna props-the wedding dress, the bed, the dance pole-to see how the singer's relationship to them has changed.) At Deitch, in a show called, annoyingly, "X-STaTIC PRo=CeSS," this image has been turned into a billboard-sized "photo animation," eight feet high and 26 feet long, housed at the back of a deep, shed-like structure designed by those suave masters of the ad hoc, LOT/EK. At this scale, the photo is essentially life-size, and the illusion that we're looking into another room is underscored by the animated images of the wafting curtains and the mounting flames. The effect is bombastic, all the more so because speakers embedded in the side of the booth are playing a loop of Madonna reciting passages from the Book of Revelation (one of the many "Justify My Love" remixes), filtered through whomping industrial noise.
But if the combination of absurdity and sincerity can turn deadly (a not uncommon problem for both Madonna and fashion photographers), trust Klein to balance it with a few oddly thrilling moments and a slew of images too slippery, too ephemeral to process except as dreams. There are four other pieces at Deitch, all sited at the far end of LOT/EK's brutally industrial, silver-sheathed shooting ranges; the darkened space feels less like an amusement arcade than a torture chamber, complete with gunshots and electronic blips. Since Klein was making video and still photos simultaneously, he was able to bring several of his pictures to life in three of the installations here. In one, Madonna sits beside herself, one figure almost immobilized in a gold-encrusted red gown and headdress, the other stretched out in a leotard and tights on a bare mattress draped with piece of vivid blue silk (when Klein uses color in his gray spaces, you can almost taste it). Both figures execute a series of stiff, stuttered gestures, the one on the bed raising and lowering her bare arms in stylized movements whose elegance is undercut by the video's jump-cut repetitions. At one point, she turns to look at us, but her glance slides away, and she cups a hand over her eyes as if to shield them from our gaze. It's the perfect Madonna performance: She's tantalizingly present but elusive-a siren, a cipher, a phantom.
In the most contained and unsettling piece, the camera hovers just above Madonna, still in black tights and a body suit, as she flails at the headboard of a wrought-iron bed. Again, her movements are abrupt and restricted; she squats, stretches, throws out an arm, grasps at the headboard, and thrusts her head through its bars over and over again, while indecipherable bits of her voice and music waft through the space. Because we never see more than a sliver of her bent and shadowed face, this is a much more anonymous performance. We can imagine that we're peering into an institutional cell at a madwoman unaware of our presence. Though there's no way to avoid the star power that generates this disturbing little drama, it's effectively dimmed and something simply human emerges. Like the best of Klein's still shots, the video offers a glimpse behind the cloak of celebrity at a solitary figure in constant flux, a woman in the never ending process of becoming and remaining a star. The accompanying catalog-243 pebble-textured, tissue-thin pages of still shots and video grabs that seem to evanesce right before your eyes-suggests that it's all an illusion within an illusion anyway. Jerking mechanically through the videos, Madonna looks like one of those Blade Runner androids mid-meltdown, or a disjointed marionette. The effect may not be as startling as Timberlake's bloody face or Pitt's naked ass, but for Madonna the imagined loss of control is shock enough. In the end, of course, this fantasy of debasement, isolation, and yoga exercises becomes yet another milestone of Madonna's relentless reinvention, but since that sort of start-again-from-scratch transformation has become Steven Klein's specialty, too, their collaboration is as spectacular as it was inevitable.
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