INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION REVIEWS

BlueSoup: Untitled, 2009,

video, 38 minutes: at the Stella
Art Foundation.

View of Lara Almarcegui's

Construction Rubbie of Secession's
Main Haii. 2010, mixed mediums;
at Vienna Secession.

LARAALMARCEGUI

SECESSION
Three works related to Viennatwo of
them site-specificmade up this solo
exhibition of Rotterdam-based Spanish
artist Lara Almarcegui. At the entrance,
visitors were handed a fold-out flier titled
Wasteiands at Nordbahnhof Vienna,
which recounts the history of a 185acre tract of land in the middle of the
city, where the Habsburg monarchy's
most important train station stood until
it was badly damaged during WWII
and then razed in the 1960s, Filled with
photographs of the site's present vegetation, the flier soberly describes the
city's plans for housing and industrial
developments there, which will spell the
end of the micro-ecosystems that have
developed over the decades. Without
over-romanticizing or propagandizing an
environmentalist point of view, the artist
makes us aware of a unique and littleknown part of the city, and its imminent
demise.
In the main gallery was Construction
Rubble of Secession's Main Hail, an
installation of nine large mounds of pulverized construction materialsconcrete,
wood, terrazzo, brick, mortar, glass, plaster, polystyrene and steelin quantities
that corresponded to their composition
of the room, with some piles reaching
almost to the 16-foot-high ceiling. This
landscape of recycled materials calls to
mind everything from Robert Smithson's
non-sites to Gordon Matta-Clark's architectural interventions and Urs Fischer's
excavation of the cement floor at Gavin

Brown's Enterprise in New York. Though

similar to her 2003 installation at the
FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, Construction
materiais of the exhibition room, in
which tidy stacks of materialsdrywall,
I beams, bags of cement, buckets of
paint, etc.were tightly grouped as if
just offloaded at a job site, this show was
more inviting. Viewers could walk among
the piles, where a close look revealed that
little weeds had begun to sprout on some
of the "hills," making a visual connection
to the photographs of the wastelands
mentioned in the flier, which have already
been taken over by nature.
Removai of the Wooden Fioor,
Grafisches Kabinett Secession, located
in a room on the first floor, consisted
of a video projection showing workers
removing, cleaning, sanding down and
then replacing the intricate herringbone
floor upon which the viewer stood while
watching the video. The relic of a past
action, the video is a document without
which the modification of the floor would
have gone unnoticed. In all her works,
Almarcegui draws attention to our overlooked surroundings, and provides a hint
of what went into their making.
David Ulrichs
MOSCOW

BLUESOUP

STELLA ART FOUNDATION

The Moscow-based collective BlueSoup
uses computer graphics to create videos that show meticulously crafted,
illusionistic but desolate landscapes
and seascapes, often with some subtle
departures from the realistic. There is no

narrative development; in fact, some of

the videos betray only the slightest movement after prolonged viewing.
The untitled work from 2009 which was
recently on view at the Stella Art Foundation
shows an ocean with gently rolling waves
under a blue sky. There is no sound in
this 38-minute piece, and the colors are
few: navy, azure and green, dappled with
reflected sunlight cn the waves' edges. The
scene is free of incident: no marine animals
appear, no froth forms on the surface, one
sees no ships or other human traces. In
the midst of this otherwise hyperrealistic
expanse, a furrow stretches from the right
middle ground toward the left background,
as though some offscreen Moses had
parted the waters, only this time using
computer code. The crevice seems, mysteriously, to leave one part of the ocean
higher than the other.
The work was projected on one entire wall
of a room painted black. As in a classical seascape painting, the low point of view fosters
the illusion of an unbound expanse of water
that can seem overwhelming. One could
almost suspend disbelief and ignore the fact
that everything we see has been constructed
via a motion graphics program, so profound
is the awe one feels at the sublimity of nature.
BlueSoup was founded in Moscow in
1996 by Alex Dobrov, Daniel Lebedev
and Valry Patkonen; they were joined by
Alexander Lobanov in 2002. In a press
release, they suggest that the new work
offers a metaphor for impassable borders, but for the viewer, the boundary
between reality and fantasy proves highly
permeable before this powerful illusion.
Yulia Tikhonova
JANUARY'11 ART IN AMERICA

129

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