SOCIÉTÉ
TRISHA BAGA
1985 born in Venice, FL / Works in New York, NY
2010 MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College / New York, NY
2007 BFA Cooper Union School of Art / New York, NY
Solo Exhibitions
2016
LOAF / Société / Berlin
2015
Orlando / Greene Naftali / New York
2014
Free Internet / Gio Marconi / Milan
Zabludowicz Collection / London
2013
Gravity / Peep-Hole / Milan
Florida / Société / Berlin
2012
Holiday / Dundee Contemporary Arts / Dundee
The Biggest Circle / Greene Naftali Gallery / New York
Plymouth Rock 2 / Whitney Museum of American Art / New York
World Peace / Kunstverein München / Munich
Rock / Vilma Gold / London
2011
Trisha Baga: Performative Screening / EAI / New York
Screenings and Group Exhibitions
2016
Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016 / Whitney Museum of American Art / New York
Biennale of Moving Images (BIM) / Centre d‘Art Contemporain Genéve
Development, Okayama Art Summit 2016 / Okayama
Quetzal Art Centre / Vidigueira
Perfect Lives / Kunstverein Göttingen / Göttingen
Art Basel Parcours / Basel
Manifesta 11 / European Biennial of Contemporary Art / Zurich
Seven on Seven / New Museum / New York
Secret Surface. Where Meaning Materializes / KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
2015
Co-workers / Musée d’Art Moderne / Paris
Strange Pilgrims / The Contemporary Austin / Austin
Concentrations 59: Mirror Stage -Visualizing the Self After the Internet / Dallas Museum of Art / Dallas
DIDING - An Interior That Remains an Exterior? / Künstlerhaus KM– / Graz
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
GHP / Jane Hartsook Gallery / New York
YES WE‘RE OPEN / Giò Marconi / Milan
Cadence Exits / Proxy Gallery / Rhode Island
2014
Private settings / Art after the Internet / Museum of Modern Art / Warsaw
High Performance / curated by Bernhard Serexhe & Julia Stoschek / Riga Art Space / Riga
Forget Amnesia (with Jessica Stead) / Volcano Extravaganza festival / Fiorucci Art Trust / Stromboli
Sequence 5 / Miguel Abreu Gallery / New York
High Performance / curated by Bernhard Serexhe & Julia Stoschek / Julia Stoschek Collection at ZKM / Düsseldorf
That Singing Voice / curated by Matt Moravec / Galería Marta Cervera / Madrid
Apples and Pears / Drei / Cologne
2013
The Stand In (or A Glass of Milk) / Public Fiction / Los Angeles
Freak Out / Green Naftali / New York
Frieze Sounds Program / London
Trisha Baga & Jessie Stead / Speculations on Anonymous Materials / Friedericianum / Kassel
Trisha Baga / Meanwhile......Suddenly and Then / 12th Biennale de Lyon / curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran / Lyon
TRISHA BAGA & NO BROW / Galerie Emanuel Layr / Vienna
Hercules Radio / Frieze Sounds Program / New York
The Magnificient Obsession / MART / Rovereto
2012
Paraphantoms / Temporary Gallery / Cologne
New Pictures of Common Objects / MoMA PS1 / New York
Inside Out / Kunsthaus Dresden / Dresden
Troubling Spaces / Zabludowicz Collection / London
Soundworks / Institute of Contemporary Art / London
Entrance Entrance / Temple Bar and Gallery / Dublin
Between Commissions / The Cornerhouse / Manchester
You Told Me the Other Night / Wst street Gallery / New York
2011 This is Tomorrow / Annarumma Gallery / Naples
Open File / Grand Union / Birmingham
Sandwich pedestrian mysticism sandwich sonata / Johann Koenig Gallery / Berlin
The Event / Grand Union / Birmingham
Fernando / Franklin Street Works / Stamford
Hasta Mañana / Greene Naftali Gallery / New York
14 & 15 / Curated by David Muenzer / The Lipstick Building / New York
The Great White Way Goes Black / Vilma Gold / London
Trisha Baga / Migration Forms Festival / Anthology Film Archives / New York
Rectangle with the Sound of Its Own Making / The Fourth Wall at Vox Populi / Philadelphia
Alias / Bunker Sztuki / Contemporary Art Museum of Krakow / Krakow
2010
En el Barrio de Gavin Black through evas arche und der Feminist / Gavin Brown´s Enterprise / Curated by Pati Hertling / New York
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
In the Company of / Curated by Terri Smith / Housatonic Museum of Art / Bridgeport
The Pursuer / Greene Naftali Gallery / New York
Greater New York Cinema Program / PS1 / New York
Beside Himself / Curated by Terri Smith / Ditch Projects / Springfield
Hardcorps: Movement Research Festival 2010 / Center for Performance Research / New York
Alphabet Soup / The Creative Alliance / Baltimore
A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the Filmography of James O.Incandenza / The Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia
University / New York
2009
Adventures Close to Home / Curated by Peggy Ahwesh / Anthology Film Archives / New York
Los Solos II / Curated by Bonnie Jones / The Load of Fun Theater / Baltimore
The Fuzzy Set / Curated by Pilar Conde / LAXART / Los Angeles
Then and Now / LGBT Community Center / New York
2008
Our Bodies / Our Selves / Curated by A.L. Steiner / El Centro Cultural Montehermoso / Vitoria-Gasteiz
Betweeen Us… / Curated by Meghan Dellacrosse / Leo Koenig Gallery / Andes
Salad Days 3 / Artist’s Space / New York
Intermission / Art-In-General’s Audio in the Elevator Program / New York
2007
Thank God for My Beautiful Black Locks of Golden Black Hair / Cooper Union’s Houghton Gallery / New York
Commisions
2009
Love Affair of the Painter Balla and a Chair / Futurist Life: Redux for Performa 09 / Anthology Film Archives and SFMoMA
iShowU09 / Alexander McQueen for Target Launch Event / Curated by Sofia Hernandez
Bibliography
2016
Tina Sauerlaender / LOAF – A Blurry Eye Exam, or the Sourdough Hippocampus, Berlin / ArteFuse / September
Kristian Vistrup Madsen / Critics picks, Berlin / Artforum / September
Yves Decline / Trisha Baga @ Société reviewed / aqnb / September
Mark Westall / FAD’s Top 10 to see whilst at BERLIN ART WEEK / FAD / September
Seven gallery shows you shouldn‘t miss during Berlin Art Week! / artlead / September
Maximilíano Durón / NEWS RHIZOME’S 2016 SEVEN ON SEVEN LINEUP / ArtNews / April
2015
Adams, Abraham / Trisha Baga Orlando / Review / Artforum / November
Smith, Roberta / Trisha Baga Mixes Orlando, Fla., With ‘Orlando’ / Review / The New York Times / September
50 Must-See Fall Exhibitions / Artsy / August
Sherman, Elisabeth / On Trisha Baga‘s The Great Pam / Artforum / April
LAB / A project by Trisha Baga / Cura Magazine / Issue 19 / March
2014
Nathan, Emily / The shape of things / ARTnews / October / p 96 - 103
Casavecchia, Barbara / Trisha Baga’s Free Internet at Gio Marconi / Review / Art Agenda / July
Croomer, Martin and Barnes, Freire / Time Out London / Women Artists on the Cutting Edge / March
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Devine, Tom / Made In Camden / The Zabludowicz Collection / Exhibition Review / March
Review on Trisha Baga at Zabludowicz Collection, London / Fad / March
2013
Gravity. Trisha Baga / Review / Cura Magazine / September
Stern, Sara / Trisha Baga at Société / Frieze d/e / Issue 10 / June
Nelson-Teutsch, Hanna / Talk Trashy To Me / Art Parasites / May
Davies-Crook, Susanna / Exhibition of the week: Trisha Baga at Societe Berlin / Dazed Digital / May
Dougherty, Cecilia / Trisha Baga at Whitney Museum and Greene Naftali / Review / Art In America / March
Irrgang, Christina / Paraphantoms / Temporary Gallery / Frieze d/e / Issue Nr. 8 / February-March
Malouf, Mathieu / Attitude Becomes Dorm / Trisha Baga at Greene Naftali / Texte Zur Kunst / Issue Nr. 89 / March / p 199
2012
Jaskey, Jenny / Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2 at the Whitney Museum / Mousse Magazine / December
Vying for Fluency in Many Languages / The New York Times / December
Review / Trisha Baga: Holiday, DCA, Dundee / Herald Scotland / December
Dellacrosse, Meghan / New York Trisha Baga: BODY LOOKING/LOOKING EMBODIED / Fruits of the Forest / Issue 3 /
Review / Trisha Baga - „World Peace“ / Monopol / Spring
Review / Trisha Baga: Rock / Time Out London / June
Review / Trisha Baga: Rock / Blouin Artinfo / April
2011
Rosales, Esperanza / Nice to meet you - Trisha Baga / Hands-on / Mousse Magazine / Nr. 31 / November
Rutland, Beau / Hasta Mañana / Art Forum / October
Review / Trisha Baga / Fourth Wall / Tan / January
2007
Strouse, Allen / Viral Video / Review / Artinfo / November
Awards and Scholarships
2016
Nam June Paik Award 2016 / Museum Folkwang, Essen
2011
Louise Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award / New York
2008
Joan Mitchell Foundation Scholarship / Atlantic Center for the Arts / New Smyrna Beach
2007
MFA Fellowship / Bard College / New York
Burckhardt Foundation Award / The Cooper Union / New York
2003 – 2007
Cooper Union Full Tuition Scholarship / The Cooper Union / New York
Publications
2014
The Great Pam / A Book by Trisha Baga / Graphic design by Nick Parker / Ed. Société / Berlin
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Artforum
Trisha Baga
Trisha Baga, Ghost, 2016, 3-D digital video, color, sound, 14 minutes 23 seconds. Installation view.
Trisha Baga’s latest exhibition, “LOAF,” takes its name from a series of glazed ceramic slices of bread that reveal a colorful surface
under each crust. They resemble marbled paper, photographs of interstellar nebula, or even nebula in the medical sense: a clouded spot on the cornea that causes blurry vision. The show is a generous display of two 3-D video installations, a sculpture of a cat’s
play tower with various found objects, and thirty-odd ceramic sculptures arranged as if in a doctor’s waiting room.
Brother Making an Impressionist Painting (all works 2016) is a ceramic printer halfway through printing a blurry landscape. Thinking of Impressionism’s shift of focus from objective to subjective representation, one wonders how this might extend to contemporary mediated images. The face of Hillary Clinton on the cover of New York Magazine for There Is Nothing Simple About Hillary
Clinton and of Nicki Minaj on Rolling Stone for Mad Genius Manic Diva are partly covered with ceramic reproductions of the same
images, highlighting the obfuscation that was already present in the originals. But seeing is also personal: For Baga,Ellen DeGeneres is a brain-like shape.
In the 3-D video Ghosts, the artist revisits the moment when Alexander Graham Bell made the first ever telephone call and had no
one to dial. The video portrays an anxiety with the spectacle of networked society collapsing into invisibility; live streaming to no
audience, where screens are also smokescreens. The show becomes a tenderly frantic insistence on the materiality of the layers of
mediation that surround us—a blurry vision made in glazed clay.
Kristian Vistrup Madsen
Originally published on http://artforum.com/index.php?pn=picks&id=63514&view=print, September 2015
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Artforum
Trisha Baga
Installation view ‘Orlando’ at Greene Naftali, 2015
There is a scene toward the end of Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975) in which a lantern on a solitary table rolls and falls into the grass,
and though we hear a constant sound of leaves, the fall is silent. In Trisha Baga’s latest solo outing, the subtle drama of that unexpected sensual loss receives a strangely maximalist reincarnation. One scene of the 3-D video installation MS Orlando (all works
2015) depicts a group dance lesson in a mall, led by a head-miked, corporately poloed instructor, who becomes devoiced midscene, as if she’d switched to speaking with the silence of galactic voids. This beyond-sensical, post-Trecartin, post-Henrot, weirdly
Tarkovskian mess couldn’t be more welcome at a moment when 3-D cinema often seems a glorified extrusion of the 2-D filmic
surface. AbEx gestures float groundless between the viewer’s body and the screen, their casual ephemerality seeming to negate
contemporary abstract painting’s earnest efforts, while footage taken from inside a carwash plays beyond. A snatch of Terminator
dialogue bubbles over at the top: “Time isn’t linear, we just perceive it that way.” Yes, one thinks, and neither is space anymore.
The gallery is dominated by Baga’s ceramics, mostly depicting banal objects such as Crocs (Untitled) and one Purell dispenser.
These works, formed and glazed with a careless virtuosity that self-consciously exceeds their subject matter, are numerous and
crowded in display. Why give us this aggressive panoply? The answer is in the air above, where a 3-D peacock pecks at a portrait
made of seeds (Peacock Museum The Department of Education). It’s pecking at plastic form itself.
Abraham Adams
Originally published on http://artforum.com/archive/id=54831, November 2015
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
The New York Times
Trisha Baga Mixes Orlando, Fla., With ‘Orlando’
Installation view ‘Orlando’ at Greene Naftali, 2015
In her second solo show at this gallery, Trisha Baga cultivates the ambitious sprawl of media and narratives prominent in her double
New York debut here and at the Whitney Museum in 2012. Her previous efforts coalesced into disorienting surrounds of video
projections on walls and nearby objects, whose patchwork of subjects included the popular artsplainer Sister Wendy and Plymouth
Rock. Her latest works keep the media more distinct, though not the themes.
Here Ms. Baga crosses Orlando, Fla., with “Orlando,” Virginia Woolf’s novel of same-sex love and gender fluidity; people on a cruise
ship; and, according to the gallery news release, at least, catastrophic global warming. Not everything works equally well. On the
wall, photo-based portraits made primarily from quinoa show Ms. Baga and her family in drag, suggesting well-known works by
Vik Muniz and Janine Antoni. A shortish projected video of peacocks seeming to make and then eat larger quinoa portraits of Rosie
O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres also seems routine.
Much more engrossing is an array of glazed ceramic objects — everything from calculators, Doritos chips and Crocs slip-ons to
small, functioning pipes shaped like distinctly different vaginas. They suggest off-color tourist souvenirs but also resemble exotic
stones or shells. Many of these pieces are terrific, especially when they escape a convention of cartoonish rendering dating from
Robert Arneson.
The main video is also good. At about 34 minutes, it doesn’t incorporate objects and is viewed from video-gaming chairs that have
speakers in the headrests. But it’s 3-D, and Ms. Baga has parlayed different scenes, layers of space and presentational formats
(screen grabs, animation)into what feels like an installation unto itself. Sometimes elements of the video inspired the ceramic
pieces, like the beguiling “Google Chrome.” Ms. Baga, who just turned 30, is operating on all cylinders.
Originally published in The New York Times, September 2015
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Artforum
Elisabeth Sherman on Trisha Baga’s The Great Pam
Trisha Baga is fluent in the emotional manipulation of popular culture. From Madonna to Plymouth Rock to American Beauty, the
artist channels and contorts the manufactured affect of mass culture in her immersive videos, installations, and performances. And
if her environments are often overwhelming, with maximal arrays of information being emitted by screens and sounds and objects,
they nevertheless deploy their cultural clichés with pinpoint accuracy, situating the viewer not only in a specific historical moment
but also at a precise point along a narrative arc. It’s fitting, then, that for her most recent artist’s book, Baga has cannibalized one
of the most classic American tales: The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sordid and violent chronicle of the Roaring Twenties.
At first glance, The Great Pam looks like any other well-worn paperback. But on closer inspection, the tome is clearly a hardcover
facsimile of an old Gatsby, with the telltale image of a piece of masking tape bearing the word PAM on its wrinkled surface—transforming the name of the titular character into that of Baga’s sister. The Great Pam reproduces, from front to back—although not
always to scale—Scribner’s 1995 ten-dollar edition of the novel, found in high school classrooms nationwide. The artist’s manipulations appear minimal at first and recall the damage that schoolbooks endure shoved to the bottom of backpacks or lockers. The
edges of the pages are stained, as if from an errant leaky pen, and bits of paper, rubber bands, and gum wrappers drift over and
past the familiar text.
As Fitzgerald’s narrative builds, so do Baga’s interventions. More desk detritus appears upon the spread pages, joined by floating,
impasto brushstrokes of paint, celebrity tabloid photos, potato-chip bags, and ceramic sculptures. The paperback, at first aligned
with the physical object, recedes into all of this stuff, becoming another character rather than the mostly readable ground of
Fitzgerald’s book. We are not so far from Baga’s work in video: Animated through the turning of pages, the book’s recurring motifs drift around the increasingly obscured words; in one example, a photo of Baga’s dog shifts ever so slightly across a handful of
spreads, like a flip-book. The novel itself seems to swirl away, getting lost first on the floor, then in the chaos of the artist’s studio,
then in darkness, projected light occasionally piercing through and revealing distant text, before returning to align with the parameters of the artist’s book just in time for Gatsby’s funeral, flooded with pastel watercolor. Baga’s additions echo the sickening excess
of Gatsby’s world; when Fitzgerald writes that Gatsby “literally glowed” when looking at Daisy, the page is dotted with rhinestones.
Through all of this chaos, the physical book remains both a bystander to and a participant in the journey, perversely embodying its
narrator, Nick Carraway, guiding the reader through beauty and destruction.
Even as every page holds an overwhelming sense of her bright, tumultuous aesthetic, Baga composed this book in absentia. She
hired a friend, artist Nick Parker, to act as graphic designer. Through ongoing conversations, Baga gave Parker a script of sorts (a
sense of compositional and tonal shifts to guide the rhythm of the book) and actors (a quantity of detritus on her computer and in
her studio amassed after recent projects) with which to design the project. Parker scanned the original paperback in Baga’s studio,
with and among her things, while she was away.
The world Baga creates in her art—with its immersive exuberance constructed from the projected and physical clutter of an artist’s
production—reflects the synaesthetic and synthetic experience of contemporary life. The constant inundation of screens, noise,
and matter both constitutes and confounds our sensory experience of the physical world. If the artist’s installations have externalized this phenomenon by breaking the fourth wall of the projected image through the interference of objects, mirrored refractions,
and 3-D simulations, this book returns to the world of the mind. Not unlike Paul Thek and Edwin Klein’s A Document, 1969, which
mixed Polaroids of Thek’s studio with three-dimensional objects and magazine clippings on newspaper spreads, the book becomes
an archive of projects and interests. And it repositions Baga as director, as well as auteur, of her compositions.
Baga’s amendments to Gatsby act as twenty-first-century marginalia. Rather than annotating the text with handwritten thoughts,
she comments by way of digitally manipulated images. Baga’s intervention suggests that we now inevitably experience the act of
reading as a mise en abyme of collected references. But The Great Pam moves beyond the now common celebration—or lamentation—of the analog-to-digital progression. Instead, Baga reminds us that the relationship between a book and its reader is intimate
and personal, a kind of mental collaboration. The force of the artist’s annotations is not one-sided: Gatsby asserts its own power on
her accumulations, acting as organizing principle for this flotsam of Internet-culture accessibility, taming the endless stream into a
comfortably familiar narrative arc, one legible even when the words themselves are completely obscured.
Toggling between immersive, hyperactive distraction and quiet, contemplative space, she sucks us into her fiction. The Great Pam
allows the reader to see this all-too-familiar tale with the details stripped away, leaving the residue of the recurring tragedy and
“orgastic future”—to quote Gatsby’s famous conclusion—of the American dream.
Elisabeth Sherman
Originally published in Artforum, April 2015
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Artnews
The Shape of Things
1/4
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
To prepare for a solo exhibition last summer at Société Berlin, 28-year-old Trisha Baga showed up with her laptop, a few hard drives
containing an arsenal of found and manufactured sound bites, animations, video clips, and still images, and one small box full of
garbage. “It’s garbage I could only find in America,” says the Bushwick-based artist, explaining that she prefers to acquire most of
her physical materials from local shops and manufacturers, and that she uses them as shapes, rather than identifiable items. “I
even brought a big tub of Cheez Balls to be an orange form,” she adds.
Alone in the gallery while the staff was busy with art fairs, Baga got down to work, weaving her varied digital sources—many of
which she filmed herself with a 3-D camera—into disorienting, choppily edited video projections. Her signature technique, perhaps best described as multimedia installation, combines these moving collages with sculpture, painting, sound, and seemingly
haphazard arrangements of the everyday trinkets she has collected, spread across the gallery floor. As the projected images shift
and flicker against the wall, they collide with the static, anthropomorphic shadows cast by the objects set purposefully in their
way—obsolete speakers, tangled wires, pizza boxes, lamps, plastic toys—and a steady dialogue is generated between physical and
digital worlds.
“My stuff is about transitions,” Baga says. “It’s about different layers and mediums touching each other, like different bodies. A
painting is an object; it’s really resolute. But a projection seems sexual,” she adds, “like it’s licking and wrapping itself around everything. I think there is something very romantic about that.”
In conjunction with her first solo show at Chelsea’s Greene Naftali Gallery in 2012, Baga’s 3-D video installation Plymouth Rock
(2012) was presented in the Whitney Museum’s lobby gallery. Inspired by the historic time-ravaged rock that was considered by
many a monument to freedom and a symbol of patriotic pride, the piece includes fragmented images of journeys: a glowing jellyfish flapping through a dark sea; a man with a metal detector seeking treasure on the beach. But the symbolic grandness of these
visuals is brought to ground by the silhouettes of ordinary objects slumping and hunching against them, as haunting notes from
the American Beauty soundtrack fade into footsteps, gusts of wind, and labored breathing.
Born in Venice, Florida, Baga is skilled in producing material whose superficial playfulness belies its substantial conceptual underpinnings. Her Berlin exhibition, “An Inconvenient Trash,” was ostensibly a satire based on Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and it featured numerous room-size installations and 3-D projections. Despite the abundance of pop music (including appearances by Cher and Madonna), cute graphics, and decontextualized monologues from Gore’s original film, the works on
view offered surprisingly sincere, poetic reflections on consumer culture and environmental degradation.
The Bather (2013), for example, allots 14 minutes to a steady, bird’s-eye view of small bits of colored paper as they float languidly
down into a water-filled claw-foot tub. Lifted occasionally on updrafts, the confetti flutters at varying speeds, cutting angles across
the frame or quivering as wildly as Aspen leaves. As each scrap lands on the water, its dye is released and seeps across the surface
like rivers viewed from space. Pigments merge and swirl together in gentle eddies that evoke oil spills, melting icebergs, and a polluted planet colored by waste as toxic as it is vibrant.
2/4
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Although there is technically no performance involved, Baga’s practice is extremely performative, requiring the active coordination
of shadow, light, color, moving image, object, and sound, often with minimal preparation. “I basically made the Berlin show during
the two weeks of install,” she says. “Everything behaves so differently when it’s small, viewed in my studio or on my computer, and
when it’s large—so I try to wait as long as I can to make those decisions. It makes my studio practice a lot more free in that way,
because then it just feels like exercising or something, trying different combinations and remembering what looks good.”
Located in a large Bushwick loft building, just off a main street lined with bodegas, Baga’s studio looks more like the warehouse for
a craft store than a functioning workspace. Inside, floor-to-ceiling windows are draped with black fabric, and every inch of surface
is covered with piles of construction paper, empty beer cans, cleaning supplies, takeout-food boxes, fabric, tubes of paint, and clay
sculptures. The only place to sit is the floor—and that is where Baga likes to work, crouched next to her laptop and a projector
aimed permanently at her “exercise” wall, which retains traces of earlier productions, like faint eraser marks. Bits of old tape, dried
expanses of paint, and nails obscure and deflect whatever she projects there, so the slate for her work is never entirely blank. Overlapping soundtracks blare from the speakers of a rocking video-game chair she found on the street and hooked up to her computer.
Due to the nature of Baga’s art, there are no finished works in sight—but every broken lawn ornament, bottle of glitter, and packet
of hot sauce seethes with potential. Once objects have entered her orbit, they become not only rehearsal props but also actors,
waiting to be cast in some future production; in the meantime, they clutter her space like nascent ideas. Her process is one of trial
and error, vision and revision, a constant state of adjustment. “I think it’s knowing that the environment makes better decisions
than I do,” she says, as she hits the projector’s ON switch and cues up the footage from an eight-minute video, An Inconvenient
Trash (2013), that was included in the 2013 Lyon Biennial. “Let’s try it with the music from Harry Potter,” she muses, gesturing
toward the DVD menu screen on her computer’s desktop.
Projected on the wall, the former vice-president turns toward the camera. “I’ve been trying to tell this story for a long time,” he
says, and Baga—improvising—fades in the Harry Potter theme song, its melody swelling in an impassioned crescendo. “I’m cinematic,” she says. “I think that movie scores, especially popular Hollywood movie scores, just elongate the space of looking at a
picture. If they work right, you don’t really hear them—they’re like MSG. They’re flavor enhancers.” When Gore addresses a colorcoded map of the United States, Baga jumps up, grabs a twisted wire hanger from the floor, and dangles it from a nail in the wall,
stepping back and adjusting until its serpentine shadow, cast across the projection, echoes the path of the Mississippi River.
3/4
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
In the summer of 2012, during a stretch of 90-degree nights, Baga’s studio flooded. “I had no natural disaster to blame,” she says.
“A plastic cup got stuck in a drainpipe on the roof. But I had just made this book, The Great Pam, and it’s actually kind of nice because it turned out to be like an archive of everything in my studio just before it got ruined.” Released over the summer by Société
Berlin—it debuted at Art Basel in June—and named after both The Great Gatsby and the artist’s sister, Pam, the outside cover suggests a vintage copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. Inside, as the story progresses, our view of each page zooms out incrementally
and is increasingly dominated by cutout digital photographs of detritus from Baga’s studio. Googly eyes, gemstones, nail polish, a
BIC lighter, green yarn, and an empty Doritos bag dart in and out of the lines of text and appear to mingle on the page like living
creatures, until the narrative gives way almost completely to nonsensical, Photoshopped compositions.
“The book is based on a mess, the root of it is chaos,” Baga says, adding that she didn’t design the pages herself. Instead, she sent
her friend, a graphic designer, to her studio when she was away, gave him a “script” of actions to complete—“put Gatsby on the
scanner, take a picture, put any two objects to your right on the scanner, take a photo, etc.”—and left the rest to chance. All of
her work is marked by that same context contingency, which acknowledges the many layers and polyvocal nature of experience.
“Lately I’ve been thinking about the synchronization of things,” she says. “You’re in a Laundromat, and the TV is on, and you can
attribute the voices to other things like the washing machine. You put in a rhythm with your eyes, looking back and forth between
two loads, and suddenly it becomes a drama between wet whites and dry colors.”
Baga was raised in Florida by her Filipino-immigrant parents. Her father is a doctor, and her mother a housewife who “cooks and
watches soap operas,” she says. “So I grew up watching a lot of those.” After graduating with an M.F.A. from Bard in 2010 (she
received a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union in 2007), Baga lived for many years in New York’s East Village with her sister, who was
enrolled in an accelerated nursing program at NYU. She recently moved into her Brooklyn studio, and she sleeps there amid all the
chaos. “My dad is a radiologist,” she says. “He spends his whole day in a dark room looking for patterns—and I do the same thing.
That’s really how we are able to talk about things.”
Emily Nathan
Originally published in ARTnews, October 2014
4/4
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Art Agenda
Trisha Baga´s “Free Internet” at Giò Marconi, Milan
Trisha Baga, Mouth, 2014. Two video projections and installation with
various objects, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Giò Marconi, Milan
“Free Internet,” Trisha Baga’s exhibition at Giò Marconi, is a scrappy, energetic, stoned out tour de force in visual stimulation. Behind 3D glasses, your eyes have to move fast in order to focus on her continuous ping-pong of vacillating images: floating slices of
“Free
Internet,”
Trisha Baga’s
exhibition
at Giò
Marconi,
is aat
scrappy,
out tour
de force
in visual
stimulation.
Behind 3D
glasses,
your eyes
have
salami,
overlapping
images,
bats
in caves,
cats
night,energetic,
partyingstoned
animals,
icons
jumping
at you,
and internet
search
results
with
to move
fast
in
order
to
focus
on
her
continuous
ping-pong
of
vacillating
images:
floating
slices
of
salami,
overlapping
images,
bats
in
caves,
cats
at
night,
partying
keywords like, “where is my vagina?”—which immediately reminded me of artist Nam June Paik’s 1962 hand-scrawled composianimals, icons jumping at you, and internet search results with keywords like, “where is my vagina?”—which
immediately reminded me of artist Nam June Paik’s
tion Danger Music for Dick Higgins: “Creep into the VAGINA of a living WHALE.”1 Sounds, glitches, radio feeds, samples of laughter,
1962 hand-scrawled composition Danger Music for Dick Higgins: “Creep into the VAGINA of a living WHALE.”(1) Sounds, glitches, radio feeds, samples of
and and
songs
contribute
thework’s
work’s
overall
synesthesia.
like browsing
through aofchronology
fragments
of “reality,”
or whatlaughter,
songs
contribute to
to the
overall
synesthesia.
It’s likeIt’s
browsing
through a chronology
fragments ofof
“reality,”
or whatever
that means
in the age
ever
thatRift.
means in the age of the Oculus Rift.
of the
Oculus
AndAnd
indeed,
once inside
show, the
“Is this
real?”“Is
becomes
a persistent
question.
This must be—to
borrowThis
the term
from
art historian
Michael
Baxandall—our
indeed,
oncetheinside
show,
this real?”
becomes
a persistent
question.
must
be—to
borrow
the term
from art “period
hiseye.” Baxandall first introduced this term in 1972 to characterize the impact of cultural factors on our ways of processing visual data and understanding pictures.(2)
torian
Michael
Baxandall—our
“period
eye.”
Baxandall
first
introduced
this
term
in
1972
to
characterize
the
impact
of
cultural
facHe argued, for instance, that during the Renaissance both painters and public embraced geometric perspective at a time when merchants and bankers increasingly
2
tors on
our ways
processing
visual
datahave
and inunderstanding
pictures.
He argued,
instance,
thatRichard
duringHamilton
the Renaissance
practiced
arithmetic
and of
calculations.
What
we might
the mid-twentieth
century called
the “Popfor
eye,”
British artist
(1922–2011)both
unwitpainters
andin public
geometric
perspective
a timesowhen
merchants
andsexiness
bankersofincreasingly
practiced
arithmetic
and of
tingly
pinpointed
1956 asembraced
something that
made “today’s
homes so at
different,
appealing.”
The current
all things post-internet
chronicles
the advent
another
shift, based What
on the habit
of mediating
one’s
identity, experiences,
and attention
deficits.
fact, this
tendency
is no Hamilton
longer the exclusive
privilege
calculations.
we might
have in
thepresence,
mid-twentieth
century called
the “Pop
eye,”InBritish
artist
Richard
(1922–2011)
of artistic
derives, like
the Bolex in
diaries
of as
Newsomething
York-based filmmaker
Jonas
Mekas, homes
to name but
significant
Artists­Tlike
Baga are finding
newof
ways
unwittingly
pinpointed
1956
that made
“today’s
so one
different,
soexample.
appealing.”
he current
sexiness
all of
solving the old problem of how to engage and include the viewer within the space of representation.
things post-internet chronicles the advent of another shift, based on the habit of mediating one’s presence, identity, experiences,
and
attention
deficits. of
Inover
fact,twenty
this works
tendency
is no2D
longer
exclusive
privilege
of paintings,
artistic derives,
likecollages,
the Bolex
of plays
Newthe
“Free
Internet,”
a constellation
(including
and 3Dthe
video
projections,
sculptures,
installations,
and diaries
tapestries),
York-based
Jonas Mekas,
namedevices—which
but one significant
Artists like
Bagaofare
finding
solvingwell
theasold
immersion
card. Itfilmmaker
includes a generous
amount oftohi-tech
Baga hasexample.
in passing compared
to “one
those
update new
alerts ways
on yourofPC”—as
loads
of objects
madeoffrom
paper,
ceramics,
papier
mâché,the
andviewer
foam. Slick
projectors
join forces
with flashlights with failing batteries, so that the show gives the impresproblem
how
to engage
and
include
within
the space
of representation.
sion of having set foot in two different time frames, past and present. Just like we all do. This fluid, mixed-media approach brought Baga (who first cut her teeth in
New York, studying at Cooper Union and Bard College, and then opening her first solo show in 2012 at the Whitney Museum of American Art) to the forefront of
“Free Internet,” a constellation of over twenty works (including 2D and 3D video projections, sculptures, paintings, installations,
exhibitions such as last year’s Lyon Biennale or last fall’s “Speculations on Anonymous Materials” exhibition at the Fridericianum in Kassel.
collages, and tapestries), plays the immersion card. It includes a generous amount of hi-tech devices—which Baga has in passing
to less
“oneanonymous
of thosethan
update
alerts
PC”—as
well asand
loads
of objects
made
paper, ceramics,
papier
mâché,
andand
Yet,compared
there’s nothing
Baga’s
heapson
of your
“materials”:
the images
objects
she employs
are from
often self-made
in collaboration
with
her family
friends;
the Slick
artist also
regularlyjoin
performs
in with
her works
in multiple,
versions andsopersonae
(here,
alsogives
with moustaches
and beards).
The first
foam.
projectors
forces
flashlights
withcoexisting
failing batteries,
that the
show
the impression
of having
setroom
footopens
in
withtwo
a group
of sculptures
set on plinths
with colored,
theatrical
Ear, One Girl,Frequent
(all works
14, her
a geodifferent
time frames,
pastand
andcast
present.
Just like
we alllightning—including
do. This fluid, mixed-media
approachFlyer
brought
Baga2014).
(whoCarbon
first cut
metrical cluster of painted toothpicks, references the scientific method for calculating time and life spans by means of progressive decay. “SO, if you had a salami
teeth in New York, studying at Cooper Union and Bard College, and then opening her first solo show in 2012 at the Whitney Muthat had 10% carbon-14 compared to a living sample, then that fossil would be T equals…line…oh, god,” says the voiceover in Baby, a large 3D video projection in
seum of
American
the deck
forefront
exhibitions
as last
year’s
Lyon Biennale or last fall’s “Speculations on Anonymous
an adjacent
room,
completeArt)
withto
striped
chairs of
in which
you cansuch
sit down,
relax,
and enjoy.
Materials” exhibition at the Fridericianum in Kassel.
Baga builds a web of cross-references and exercises in perception, repetition, and difference: in the sculpture Pizza POV, real slices of salami are pinned to a wall
above
a carpet
topped
with ceramic
objects; inSalami
digital
of salami
projected
onto
paintedshe
foamemploys
like spots;are
andoften
in Salami
Diamond,
Yet,
there’s
nothing
less anonymous
thanDisplay,
Baga’s 3D
heaps
of versions
“materials”:
theareimages
and
objects
self-made
inthe
slices are projected as big as planets in a darkened room. In Sand right outside my door, the artist brings us to her studio, where she’s painting while her dog sniffs
collaboration with her family and friends; the artist also regularly performs in her works in multiple, coexisting versions and persoaround and tries to devour every image (3D and otherwise) in sight. Time flies, as the “love clock” on Baby’s wall reminds us, and scenes shot in London, New
nae
(here,
also
and recent
beards).
The firststays
room
opensRico
withflash
a group
of sculptures
set on plinths
and cast
with
colored,
York,
Florida,
and
in awith
cave moustaches
from one of Baga’s
professional
in Puerto
by (amongst
the most recognizable
characters
in the
video
are naked
theatrical
lightning—including
Ear, One Girl, Frequent Flyer (all works 2014). Carbon 14, a geometrical cluster of painted toothmembers
of the Vienna-based
collective gelitin).
picks, references the scientific method for calculating time and life spans by means of progressive decay. “SO, if you had a salami
On the
opposite
sidecarbon-14
of the gallery,
Baga turnsto
theaimposing
main room
into
her fossil
own version
a dark
cave. There are wires
andsays
projectors,
as well as ainnumber
that
had 10%
compared
living sample,
then
that
wouldofbe
T equals…line…oh,
god,”
the voiceover
Baby, of
manipulated objects across a series of works—including Mouth, a room-size installation with rocking chairs-cum-stereo system; Guano, a multi-piece sculpture
a large 3D video projection in an adjacent room, complete with striped deck chairs in which you can sit down, relax, and enjoy.
with flashlights directed at small mirrors that light up into temporary moons; and the 3D video installation Twin’s Party with recorded party scenes repeating at short
intervals like in a sports instant replay. Baga toys with Plato’s allegory of the cave, whose prisoners can not only see shadows, but also imagine grasping the objects
and forms that cast them, so that appearances might be mistaken for reality. Very appropriate, I guess, for an artist who describes her practice as a way to “guide
phenomenological compositions about the acts of looking and recognizing, and the gap in between.”(3)
1) Nam June Paik, “Danger Musik for Dick Higgins,” in Notations, ed. John Cage (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), not paginated [207].
1/2
2) As Baxandall writes, “A picture is sensitive to the kinds of interpretive skill—patterns, categories, inferences, analogies—the mind brings to it.” See Michael
Wichelhaus
GbR / Century
GenthinerItaly:
Strasse
36 / 10785
Berlin
/ Germany
/ +49
30 261Style
03283
/ contact@societeberlin.com
Baxandall, Painting andBülow
Experience
in Fifteenth
A Primer
in the
Social
History of
Pictorial
(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1974), 34.
3) Trisha Baga, “About”: http://bagalab.biz/work/About.html
SOCIÉTÉ
Baga builds a web of cross-references and exercises in perception, repetition, and difference: in the sculpture Pizza POV, real slices
of salami are pinned to a wall above a carpet topped with ceramic objects; in Salami Display, 3D digital versions of salami are projected onto painted foam like spots; and in Salami Diamond, the slices are projected as big as planets in a darkened room. In Sand
right outside my door, the artist brings us to her studio, where she’s painting while her dog sniffs around and tries to devour every
image (3D and otherwise) in sight. Time flies, as the “love clock” on Baby’s wall reminds us, and scenes shot in London, New York,
Florida, and in a cave from one of Baga’s recent professional stays in Puerto Rico flash by (amongst the most recognizable characters in the video are naked members of the Vienna-based collective gelitin).
On the opposite side of the gallery, Baga turns the imposing main room into her own version of a dark cave. There are wires and
projectors, as well as a number of manipulated objects across a series of works—including Mouth, a room-size installation with
rocking chairs-cum-stereo system; Guano, a multi-piece sculpture with flashlights directed at small mirrors that light up into temporary moons; and the 3D video installation Twin’s Party with recorded party scenes repeating at short intervals like in a sports
instant replay. Baga toys with Plato’s allegory of the cave, whose prisoners can not only see shadows, but also imagine grasping the
objects and forms that cast them, so that appearances might be mistaken for reality. Very appropriate, I guess, for an artist who
describes her practice as a way to “guide phenomenological compositions about the acts of looking and recognizing, and the gap
in between.”3
Babara Casaveccia
Originally published in Art Agenda, July 2014
-----------------------------------------------------------------------1) Nam June Paik, “Danger Musik for Dick Higgins,” in Notations, ed. John Cage (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), not paginated [207].
2) As Baxandall writes, “A picture is sensitive to the kinds of interpretive skill—patterns, categories, inferences, analogies—the mind brings to it.” See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 34.
3) Trisha Baga, “About”: http://bagalab.biz/work/About.html.
2/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Time Out London
Women artists on the cutting edge
Today´s art is all about sampling, splicing and generally tinkering with genres, and women are leading the way. We take a look at
the artists who define the new breed.
Trisha Baga
The backstory Born 1985 in Venice, Florida; lives in New York. Baga´s star has been rising of late with a solo show last year at New
York´s Whitney Museum of American Art. Museums can´t get enough of her immersive videos ans istallations that blend performance with digital technology.
The show Scattering objects from everyday life - beer cans, trainers, paint pots, sacks of rice - among 3D projections, Baga fills the
former Methodist church with an ordered mess that echoes the contens of her cyberconnected existence. A highlight is “Madonna
y El Nino”, which co-opts footage of Madonna to talk about changing technological currents in the pop lanscape.
The verdict A bit loke a bad internet hangover, Baga´s perpetual ‘work in progress’ aesthetic rolls the night before into the day after.
Think: Tracey Emin´s ‘My Bed’ for the Facebook generation
Martin Coomer and Freire Barnes
Originally published in Time Out London, March 2014
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Cura
Gravity. Trisha Baga
Installation view Peep-Hole, 2014
The experimental approach and versatile practice of the American artist Trisha Baga is presented at Peep-Hole within her first solo
show in an Italian institution. The title Gravity, which recalls the new 3D movie by Alfonso Cuarón, defines a site-specific project
that transforms the space into a detailed landscape composed of a fragmented polyphony of settings and materials.
Performance, video, painting, sculpture and stereoscopic projection are just some of the languages used by Trisha Baga in her vast
and manifold research, which shifts from dream to reality, social investigation to history, myth to pop imagery. All these media
contribute to create an immersive visual field, a vortex of information, where the viewers lose their certainty and discover a new
world of imagination. Found images, daily objects and simple materials are re-used, re-organized, re-coinfigured by the artist into
apparently improvised compositions.
While the first room hosts an accumulation of objects and materials, the exhibition continues with a gradual rarefaction, converging at the end in the last room, where the film Other Gravity is projected.
Originally published on http://www.curamagazine.com/?p=10426, September 2013
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Frieze
Trisha Baga I Société Berlin
Trisha Baga, An Inconvenient Trash, 2013
Most of us have come to expect some variety of slick spectacle upon receiving a pair of 3D glasses. But in Trisha Baga’s first solo
exhi­bition at Société, the technology is mobilized towards different ends – colliding with trash, craft, and the slower pace of conceptual performance.
Baga’s 3D video installations of various sizes fill all four rooms of the gallery. Most of the videos are projected onto minimally-painted and collaged Styrofoam boards leaning against walls and surrounded by objects that would usually be discarded or disguised:
projectors, DVD players and speakers lie strewn across the floor, their cables left visible and winding. An array of pizza boxes, cigarette packs, beer bottles, and crumpled aluminium scraps have been left discarded around the gallery from the installation process.
As in prior exhibitions, Baga purposefully obstructs parts of each projection with these seemingly scattered objects, which then
become actors in the work, adding surfaces for projection while casting static shadows upon the movement of the video. Coupled
with the mediation of 3D glasses, this physical layering lends her compositions a pleasurable reference to the experience of watching videos on one’s desktop with several tabs open.
Notions of waste, productivity and ecological disaster play out in Baga’s films themselves. In An Inconvenient Trash (all works
2013) she appropriates clips from the beginning of the well-known documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006) – former US Vice
President Al Gore’s attempt to disseminate the perils of global warming – and alters them, often undoing the original synched
sound and animating the screen with Microsoft Paint-like computer graphics. Unlike in most of her other works, we don’t see
Baga’s hands, head, or body in the video. Instead, most of the animation appears to be made with screen capture which the artist
performs through digital gestures like pointing and drawing with a mouse. Baga’s additions both play with and pollute the original
film – the documentary becomes just another digital artifact, the ironic result of Gore’s environmentalism filtered through the
context of gallery-based garbage.
In Parrotfish the artist enacts the grand gesture of spray-painting a map of the US over a large mound of melting snow in a backyard
rubbish dump. Her legs wrapped in bin bags and slowed by the snow and the litter, Baga’s movements are awkward but deliberate.
She often points to a section of snow, as if we the viewers might recognize a particular state, but it is rarely possible due to the
camera’s angle.
Just before the loop resets, Cher’s 1989 hit If I Could Turn Back Time comes on, and the camera zooms in sentimentally on the
shadow of the artist’s hand waving over spray-painted black arrows – probably stand-ins for some great American mountainscape.
This slow, hilariously futile, ironically patriotic land art piece is preserved in a video that is too long for most viewers to watch in its
entirety: the opposite of a Hollywood IMAX.
In the less epic The Bather, bits of tissue paper drift down onto the surface of bath water. A motif throughout several of the projections, the colourful pieces fall randomly, like in Jean (Hans) Arp’s Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of
Chance) (1916–7), but here we see Baga’s process – a kind of craft performance through play – rather than the finished Arp piece.
The colours slowly bleed out of the tissue paper: a red piece streams like a jellyfish, a pink one twirls mirroring a swatch of pale
pink paint on the Styrofoam below. The artist’s finger comes into the frame and pokes the water, sending ripples around the bath.
I think about the first time I saw an IMAX film, and grabbed at the projection as sharks zoomed towards me. But here the technology synthesizes everything into a flat, nearly continuous, photo-realistic surface and Baga’s technique cleverly mocks itself: I don’t
need to poke the video, but must remove the glasses to see the Styrofoam.
Sara Stern
Originally published in Frieze d/e n.10, June-August 2013
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Art Parasites
Talk Trashy To Me
Art star Trisha Baga brings her unique blend of video and installation to Berlin—and baby, trashy never looked so good! Join us
on our adventure to the west side of Berlin!
Once, at a party in Prague, I was introduced to a New York-based artist as a fellow New Yorker. He asked me “who I knew” before
learning my name, and as I stood in stunned silence he wandered away. Sometimes the cool kids really piss me off. And, frankly,
I’ve never really understood the contemporary art cognoscenti’s relentless return to the “trash-tallation.” Since Paul Thek perfected it in the seventies, I’m forced to ask: seriously—is there anything interesting about a room full of all the crap you’ve collected,
groceries you’ve purchased, random-ass shit from your studio, etc. etc., other than the too-cool-for-school factor? Well, as it
turns out, there just may be. At Société, Trisha Baga has put a new spin on trash, and as “cool” as it is, I kinda sorta really love it.
And, it certainly seems as though I’m not the only one—Baga has shown at MOMA PS1, The Whitney, Greene Naftali; and now,
steps away from the women of the night (and mid-afternoon), she has touched down at Société. According to her website, Trisha “engages the formal languages and concerns of sculpture, painting, cinema, music, photography, comedy and fiction”...and,
after visiting “Florida” it’s clear that she is also familiar with the work of Al Gore and the utter awesomeness of Animal House.
After all, Baga’s installation at Société is perhaps the perfect blend of high and low, trash and treasure, Doritos and Derrida.
Baga’s notorious blend of video and installation recalls, in this instance, not only the sad-but-true horror of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but also the poignant and utterly perilous search for meaning and momentum in these modern times. Quite honestly,
Baga’s work reminds me of Berlin—hooked on cheap beer and disposable lighters yet yearning for something a little brighter, a
litter better; and yes, little more sustainable.
And so, I say bring your own beach blanket, brave the bad neighborhood, and settle down with a little slice of modern life at Société. It doesn’t matter who you know, like the sunshine state itself, there’s a little something here for everyone.
Hannah Nelson-Teutsch
Originally published in Berlin Art Parasites, May 2013
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
DAZED
Hung & Drawn: art news
New shows from Berlin´s Alicja Kwade, legend Martin Kippenberger and 3D artist Trisha Baga.
Exhibition of the week: Trisha Baga at Société Berlin
Greeted with a table of 3D glasses expectation is high, and Baga doesn’t disappoint. Stereoscopic projections sit behind, or on,
artist detritus on the floor – beers, paint tins, plastic sheeting – and several cardboard structures. Baga’s exhibition is immersive,
enthralling and considered. Vignettes including floating 3D colours overlaid over a crude painting of feet at the end of a bathtub,
or a little dog grappling with a blow up foot spa, compliment the larger, longer videos. One particularly intricate composition with
equally complex soundtrack touches on graphic software and Carl Sagan amongst other influences and provides the cornerstone
in a show that prompts questions of surface, depth, materiality painting, and pop media/tech culture.
Susanna Davies-Crook
Originally published in Dazed Digital, May 2013
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Texte zur Kunst
Attitude becomes dorm
Mathieu Malouf on Trisha Baga at Greene Naftali, New York
Safely nested on the eighth floor of a Chelsea building, Greene Naftali was spared the flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy that
destroyed a lot of art in the neighborhood this past fall. Still, some of the trauma found its way back to the surface upon entering Trisha Baga’s recent exhibition at the gallery. The projected image of a palm tree on the back wall and a trail of derelict objects (as well as, occasionally, an abstract painting) sprawled across the floor vaguely recalled scenes of destruction on
Long Island beaches – with added tropical notes – as well as photos of Chelsea gallerists and their assistants putting wet art
on the curb to dry. Baga has been known to feature prominently in her videos and perform amidst her “glamorized messes”, so the alienating atmosphere at Greene Naftali – reinforced by the dim lighting required to view the 3D works – marked
somewhat of a departure. Still, the lack of human warmth was somewhat compensated for by the visibly hand-wrought
quality of the decoration, the generally festive color palette, and a diffuse but still palpable sense of slapstick theatricality.
One finds these qualities in “The Story of Painting” (2012), a 3D slideshow overlaid with quirky digital doodles and complemented
with audio narration by an amateur art historian on the subject of Impressionist painting – a stand-in for something like serious
culture. “Framed” by the shadows of small objects placed on the ground between the projector and the wall (a can of soda, a canvas employed as a sculptural prop), the piece both filters a canonical art historical reference through a populist lens, and may hint
distantly at the work of Baga’s former professor and fellow Greene Naftali artist Rachel Harrison. Yet the physical environment of
the art-school dorm offers a more potent point of origin for this attitude: A space of semi-precarious existence sometimes used to
study, sometimes just to throw parties. The impression is reinforced by the silent presence in the dark gallery of silhouettes wearing headphones as they stare at flickering screens, painted beer bottles on the ground, and a white canvas approximating both the
physical volume of a pizza box and the colorful palette of a pie with all the toppings.
Trisha Baga, “The Biggest Circle”, Greene Naftali, New York, 2012/13, exhibition view,
Photo: Jason Mandella
Until the provided pairs of electronic 3D glasses and headphones could be made out in the dark and properly activated, “Hercules”
(2012), a video projected directly on the wall, appeared scrambled and out of focus, its content not quite discernible yet not necessarily readable as an abstraction either. With the equipment turned on, the body entered a sort of hypnoid trance, and any initial
recalcitrance soon gave way to a relaxed state, the eye free to roam across the stuff protruding from the luminescent rectangle on
the wall. As is the case with many of the videos in the exhibition, there is a liberal use of digital compositing effects, transitions,
and superimpositions, somewhat facilitating the absorption of disparate video clips and sound bites. On the screen, a rapid succession of soundtracks and sequences combine appropriated and homemade material – a computer-generated fire, parties, animals,
fireworks, a slowed sequence of an athlete jumping.
The film also offers reflexive moments of respite, notably one in which we see the artist at work in her stUdio, acompanied by a
dog. The most effective of these moments may be the sequence in which a cow is seen peacefully grazing in the grass in eNhanced
3D. Contemplating this high-tech rendition of masticating, domesticated livestock, we become aware of our own sensory-deprived
body sitting in a gallery in passive enjoyment. Commenting on her work in a short interview published in Mousse, 1 Baga consistently opposes traditionally feminine attributes of softness and fluidity to masculine clichés of hardness and rigidity. Questioned by
Jenny Jaskey about the “hyper-Brechtian” quality of the breaks in her video edits, the artist proposes the term “bleeding” as an
alternative to “breaking”.
1/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Later, commenting on her move away from linear narratives, she alludes to “an attempt to curve an abstraction of the arc”, concluding that a “straight line is often the least efficient way to get anywhere”. The medusan allegory culminates when, opposing her
homemade spin on 3D to Hollywood’s oppressive, industrial use of it, Baga refers to the “juices of looking” that she tries to preserve
by keeping her work “moist”. For many artists of the same generation who engage with cutting-edge audio-visual technologies
with simultaneous proficiency and playfulness, 2 the act of looking is indeed often associated with juices and liquid environments. 3
Its title itself evoking water in a vapor state as well as an impending downpour, “Cloud Atlas” (2012) is full of mercurial seductiveness. A single-channel video projection that could elsewhere fit a normal screen is diffracted here by a small clay plate encrusted
with shards of a mirror – an artisanal variation on the artist’s signature disco ball (found in “Madonna y el Nino” as well as “Flatlands”, both 2011, not included in this exhibition). The slowly modulating hues and shifts in luminosity produced by the projection’s
footage of fireworks approximated the hypnotic flow of a lava lamp and a computer screensaver. Ambient and decorative, it still
retained something vaguely melancholic.
And this is perhaps what this exhibition as a whole – more so than its individual parts – achieves most eloquently: Sublimating
the streams of trash generated by daily existence into a decor impregnated with personal pathos. If a similar pathos could be the
product of, for example, hours working overtime in front of a computer with frequent intervals procrastinating on ­YouTube, Baga’s
work offers a perhaps more genuinely personal and handcrafted entry point for the experience. What could have easily turned into
a lugubrious accumulation of theatrical failures actually becomes a conduit for the transmission of intense feeling.
Mathieu Malouf
Originally published in Texte zur Kunst n.89, March 2013
-----------------------------------------------------------------------NOTES
1 Jenny Jaskey, “Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2 at the Whitney Museum, New York”, December 5, 2012. Online at: http://moussemagazine.it/trisha-baga-whitney/.
2 Simon Denny’s TV aquariums would be but one example; other artists treating the formal motif using other media include Pamela Rosenkranz, Yngve Holen,
Josh Kline, and Oliver Laric.
3 At odds with Baga’s protean mode of circulation, “Dickface” is an MS font created by Bill Hayden and Nicolás Guagnini in which letters are composed of small
erect penises that can only be seen when “hard” (letters do not appear unless caps lock is on). Rather than “flood” its venues, it penetrates them.
2/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Art in America
Trisha Baga at Whitney Museum and Greene Naftali
Installation view at Greene Naftali, 2013
Trisha Baga’s engaging installation at the Whitney Museum’s Lobby Gallery, Plymouth Rock 2 (2011), combined video and a number of small floor-scattered objects. These seemed as if they had been ejected from the main visual event, a large wall projection.
This video was a nonlinear essay on the history of the Rock and local tourism, with subtexts on immigration and the sea itself. The
installation reconfigured and extended an earlier exhibition, “Rock,” which appeared at London’s Vilma Gold Gallery in spring 2012.
Among the objects were a roll of paper towels, foam-core assemblages, a sideways photo of Britney Spears, a plastic water bottle
and a boom box, some of them detritus left over from the piece’s construction. Their seemingly random arrangement belied what
was in fact a tightly ordered space marked by a careful attention to minute details of assembly. The second video, projected from
the floor at the back of the gallery, threw out a spectrum of colored shapes that overlapped the main projection, and fell on the
objects and incidental items such as the security camera overhead.
Hanging on the wall where the main video was projected were two small paintings, a flyer for a Chinese restaurant and a small rice
paper window shade that became focal points where the two videos occasionally met and played off one another. Light and silhouette, video geometrics and narrative interacted with viewers and objects to blur distinctions between abstraction and representation. Baga demonstrates a clever economy of means, but she also elicits an experience of the uncanny in her particular blend of the
ordinary and playful. Seemingly accidental, improvisational occurrences imbued the most common items with a sense of mystery.
Florida-born, Baga has a background in sculpture and performance as well as video. Within several years of receiving her MFA
from Bard in 2010, she is becoming known for an immersive process of assemblage, painting and shadow play, and a skillful use
of electronic image compositing. However, the narrative loop of Plymouth Rock 2 does not entirely fulfill its potential of coming to
terms with the history referenced. American culture is presented as the debris of a routinely unexamined societal consciousness,
and the focus on the incidental failed to open a discussion beyond the delicate pathos on display.
Baga’s concurrent one-person show at Greene Naftali in Chelsea consisted of five works in which she used many of the same installation techniques. It was more ambitious than the Whitney show in scale and scope, but the work felt crowded. In The Story of
Painting (2012), BBC art commentator Sister Wendy discusses in voiceover the history of painting while 3D electronic squiggles and
color fields float across the artworks inventoried, in a challenge to the history of art as one of masterpieces. Baga’s commentaries
on both high and low art are astute, but she can too simply rely on ironic juxtaposition to highlight the gap between the two without offering any particularly new perspectives.
Meanwhile, the modest six-minute, single-channel piece Studio Photos 2012, projected at floor level in the farthest corner of
Greene Naftali, offered clues to Baga’s practice. It documents her studio process, showing how random objects influence her methodology, and revealing that synchronicity and unself-conscious invention form the resolute basis of her work.
Cecilia Dougherty
Originally published on http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/trisha-baga/, March 2013
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
FRIEZE
Paraphantoms, Temporary Gallery
Trisha Baga, Flatlands 3D, 2010, 3D video installation
‘Please remove your glasses.’ This polite directive suddenly appeared in the guise of a subtitle in Trisha Baga’s video installation
Flatlands 3D (2010). Viewers – sporting 3D glasses issued in the gallery’s foyer – had just been drawn into the depths of the film
to navigate rain-wet streets and meadows. Now, freed from the spectacles, their eyes were drawn to a disco ball placed to beside
the screen and catching some of the projector’s light. From the ball’s mirrored surface, the light was scattered into the room, the
minute reflections surrounding the viewer in the same way as the 3D raindrops seen on the camera lens in the film. The simulated
depth of the filmed image became the real depthof the room. Here, visual perception – rather than being subjected to a linear
sequence of frames – was about embedding the gazein a physical space.
In this way, Baga’s work reflects a key aim of the group show Paraphantoms: to sketch out a pictorial space that has already integrated its own breaks, whether in terms of content, materiality or structure. A picto­rial space, then, that might be said to be
troubled by itself. Curator Regina Barunke – who chose works by Ed Atkins, Amy Granat, Corin Sworn and Charlotte Prodger, Joseph
Zehrer and Baga – created an exhibition that attempted to pin down this phantom quality in both the photographic and moving
image and found this quality above all in the syntheses of media-generated images and in the spectator’s experience of the space
directly surrounding their bodies.
The central point of reference was supplied by Ed Atkins’s films Death Mask II: The Scent (2010) and Death Mask III: The Scent
(2011). Related to the film essay form, their footage oscillates between the qualities of moving images and photographic stills.
Shots of the sea, people from behind or a mountain (a recurring motif in Death Mask III) appear in various nuances of lighting.
The colour scale of the images varies between garish contrasts and black and white while showing the full range of what can be
done with image processing software, through to the almost total disappearance of the picture. The eye is repeatedly torn from
contemplating any particular scene, as screens of colour briefly flash up on the screen.
In Joseph Zehrer’s photographic installation TV-Ecken in Junggesellenwohnungen (TV corners in bachelor pads, 1997), the image
sequencing is analogue. Presented in a corner of the gallery’s foyer, the work consists of wall-mounted photographs of television
sets in apartments. In the foyer in front of each photograph, Zehrer placed a free-standing cardboard display which each bore a coloured rectangle corresponding to the screen ofthe TV set in question. Within the show as a whole, Zehrer’s work provided a sense
ofrespite by contrasting the flickering ecstatic images seen in the other video works witha moment of reflection. It even seemed as
if fragments of images in other worlds were appearing as phantoms projected onto Zehrer’s ‘colour TVs’.
On various levels, Paraphantoms aimed to encourage people to remove their (imaginary) glasses, as in Baga’s Flatlands.
To achieve this, the show deployed the circular movement of visual repetitions and loops,the discovery of a crack in the image
on second or third viewing. Although the exhibition sometimes lost itself in identifying formal analogies, as a whole it proposed
a convincing model for the analysis and treatment of today’s visual worlds which are increasingly characterized by a permanent
immersion in (hyper)real images.
Christina Irrgang
Originally published in Frieze d/e NO.8, February-March 2013
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
The New York Times
Vying for Fluency in Many Languages
The Biggest Circle, at Greene Naftali, has the most expansive view of Trisha Baga‘s work, like
„Bag‘s Circle, 2012,“ above, a video installation with an array of nondescript objects.
Trisha Baga must feel as if she had died and gone to heaven. Her poetically frowzy installations of video projections, paintings,
sculptures and scattered objects can be seen now in two New York museums — in a lobby gallery solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in “New Pictures of Common Objects,” a group show at MoMA PS 1 — and she has a sprawling exhibition
at Greene Naftali in Chelsea, a gallery admired by the art world cognoscenti. A New York resident, she also had solo shows in London and Munich in 2012. And she is only 27.
Sometimes a precocious youngster brings to the table intriguing news of her own burgeoning generation. If Ms. Baga typifies her
20-something cohort, then a description of what she does from her Web site is noteworthy. It says that she “engages the formal
languages and concerns of sculpture, painting, cinema, music, photography, comedy and fiction” to direct attention to “the acts of
looking and recognizing, and the gap in between.” To be an artist of Ms. Baga’s sort is not to be good at anything in particular, but
to be a porous intelligence open to the world and to all possible ways of mirroring it.
The Greene Naftali show, appropriately titled “The Biggest Circle,” provides the most expansive view of her enterprise. For “The
Story of Painting,” one of three installations, you don 3-D glasses and headphones, through which you hear the popular art historian Sister Wendy lecturing on canonical painters from Titian to Degas with breathless wonder.
On the floor is an array of nondescript objects, including bottles and rough abstract sculptures made of painted foam blocks; a generic, brushy abstract painting hangs on the wall. Projected onto the wall over it are changing compositions of flat, colorful abstract
shapes and a simple mask with eye holes and an oval mouth. Thanks to 3-D technology, these elements appear uncannily dimensional. Watching them with Sister Wendy’s fulsome discourse ringing in your ears makes for a comical collision of high and low.
“Hercules,” a meditation on hero worship, mixes found YouTube videos and recordings made by Ms. Baga. There are scenes from
a Madonna concert and the London Olympics; penguins on a waterside rock; a teenage boy playing with sparklers, which, seen in
3-D, seem to shoot sparks into real space; and home movies of Ms. Baga and friends on a boating and picnicking excursion.
The exhibition’s most emblematic work is “Bag’s Circle,” which centers on a floor-to-ceiling projection of the circular mouth of a
much-used but empty paper bag that is spinning around and around. The revolving, open sack suggests an ethos of inclusiveness
that calls to mind artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Pipilotti Rist.“Plymouth Rock 2,” Ms. Baga’s installation at the Whitney, is
similar to her works at Greene Naftali in the apparent randomness of its video projection and distribution of banal objects and
sculptures on the floor, some of which cast shadows on the wall.
There is also a certain narrative dimension. Images of heaving ocean swells shot from a swimmer’s point of view, and of a man
with a metal detector searching for treasure on a beach, suggest a kind of quest, a search for a Holy Grail — which turns out to be
Plymouth Rock, the boulder on which, legend has it, the Pilgrims first alighted in the New World.
1/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
An informative brochure essay by Elisabeth Sherman, a Whitney curatorial assistant who organized the show, quotes Ms. Baga’s
description of that hallowed stone’s history. It is “the saddest story of an object, where it becomes a symbol, and is moved from
place to place through overly elaborate processes, broken in half and brought back together, chipped away, all of this to accommodate various presentation modes ... Right now, they’ve built a gazebo around it to protect it from the rain. A rock protected from
the rain. It’s my favorite sculpture story.”
It is a pathetic Grail, this sad rock, which makes it all the more poignant to contemplate. It is, perhaps, a metaphor for our beleaguered spiritual condition.
In “Hard Rock,” Ms. Baga’s installation of objects and a video projection at PS 1, a 3-D image of a white cube resembling a plasticfoam cooler appears intermittently, the object seeming to hover and turn mysteriously in midair. It is another sort of Grail, one that
contains a secret, an unknown something that may or may not be knowable, perhaps the ultimate key to existence. Or maybe it is
just an empty container.
Who knows? What matters to Ms. Baga is the trip, not the final destination.
Originally published in The New York Times, December 2012
2/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Mousse Magazine
Trisha Baga “Plymouth Rock 2” at the Whitney Museum, New York
Trisha Baga interviewed by Jenny Jaskey on the occasion of “Plymouth Rock 2”, Baga’s first US solo show.
Jenny Jaskey: Your work currently on view at the Whitney Museum, Plymouth Rock 2, presents a fractured narrative. It seems to
suggest, to borrow Adorno’s aphorism, that “the whole is untrue”. I’m wondering if you could speak a bit more about your interest in the fragment and in returning to an icon of past without looking for an origin.
Trisha Baga: Now that you’ve got me thinking about the word origin (even though I’ve been listening to that song “Origin of Love”
from Hedwig and the Angry Inch over and over again for the past four months), I think the origin you are referring to, I think to
me, that is the present – the here, now experience. Which is such a dumb and impossibly slippery thing, but we are all subject to
grasping at it, each from our singular bodies. What we experience is only a fragment of what we are aware of and vice versa, and
what I am interested in is the stuff that fills the gaps. Desire is a part of it, and I am realizing that the 3D video piece I just showed
you (the long one with fireworks and karaoke starships) is about, well, this is what I wrote in my note- book earlier today: the
desire to exceed the body, and how that led to sports, the industrial revolution, 3DTV, and Madonna.
Jenny Jaskey: Speaking of Madonna, there are a number of subjects that recur in your videos. She is one, but I’m also thinking of
“natural” phenomena like water, fire, and light. I use scare quotes around “natural” here, because I’m not sure that the nature/
culture divide holds up in this case. What is the appeal of these elements for you?
Trisha Baga: Biologically, these are the elements of culture (like a bacteria culture/growth/life) – the elements of culture and perception. All living things contain water, and light is the only thing we can see. You could say that fire is the body version of light.
These are actually super-traditional references. “The sea” and “the sun” are the large bodies of these elements and they can
constantly be located as the object of metaphors, from contemporary pop songs to ancient storytelling. I think of them as moody
constants that inform and are informed by the things they surround and contain, as well as things that contain them. The words
we use to describe the weather are often the same words we use to describe emotions.
Jenny Jaskey: I once heard you say in passing that you were more interested in reality than fiction, and I’m wondering how this
might square with your obsession with larger-than-life figures like Madonna or the Olympics, typically regarded in terms of how
they occupy mediatized space.
Trisha Baga: I’ve been thinking of the show at Greene Naftali, “The Biggest Circle”, as an early stage of understanding “epic”, but
in broad layers instead of progressive steps.* The Olympics is a large subject (the history of the world’s culture) that has been
condensed by representation. In contrast, Madonna or Plymouth Rock are both body-sized subjects that have been expanded by
representation. There is something about using my own body and blunt experience as a form of mediation or filter that enables
sympathy for these bodies. You could say it makes them body-sized again. Stem cell research. * I have issues with progress – the
concept of it, the stretch towards it, the motivations behind it, and its psychological implications, especially in regard to America
and American history and ideals. It seems like an insatiable hunger, or an excuse to take things away from other people.
I think it is also related to how I’ve been stepping away from narrative video, or at least making an attempt to curve an abstraction of the arc, back into a circle. A straight line is often the least efficient way to get anywhere.
Jenny Jaskey: A number of writers have remarked on how your work is sort of hyper-Brechtian – layer upon layer of “breaks”, so
to speak: the direct address of the film, the interruption of physical objects on top of filmed objects, the play of “real” shadows
against projected ones. While Brecht was interested in laying bare the mechanisms of theater, I’m wondering if you think that is
even possible – is there any sort of outside to which we can return?
Trisha Baga: We’re over the whole fourth wall thing, right? How many times can people look at us and go “voilà!” and have that
be exciting? I hope my work bleeds rather than breaks. I know that my practice does – between art and life and making and gathering. Maybe that answers your question about the outside. But ultimately I think it depends on who is looking at the work and
what condition their eyes are in at the moment.
Jenny Jaskey: Your work for “The Biggest Circle” at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York has a strong relationship to painting, and
I’m wondering if you could say a bit more about this aspect of the work.
Trisha Baga: I don’t know how to talk about painting, but when I started working with 3D video, it felt like I was painting. I was
1/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
making curiosity-driven decisions about light and color and composition, and it was very liberating.
It was about understanding what “stripeness” is and how that is different from “redness” and “underness” and letting those
THINGS set off strings of associations without demanding that these qualities align into modes of linearity (which would bring
them outside of their own terms).
Jenny Jaskey: In other words, an interest in uncovering the hidden ecologies of the everyday materials around us. For example,
asking not just what a sequined shirt signifies, but wondering about its capacities for diffusing light.
Trisha Baga: The object is not to re-historicize, but to adjust the dials on attention, perception, and affect in order to arrive at a
THING’s natural frequency. For example, looking at an image of a tennis ball but knowing the THING you are looking at is hairiness and comedy. Wanting to pull qualities an arm’s distance away from their names, or “the people’s understanding”.
Jenny Jaskey: It strikes me that this way of looking happens much more slowly – that it requires a different pace.
Trisha Baga: I want to create a greater space of looking. The best thing about consumer-grade 3D technology is that the viewers
have their own choices to make about what they look at within the frame, allowing the images to move and change much more
slowly. It stands in contrast to Hollywood’s typical way of directing focus and eye movement, which I find so oppressive and wasteful. To borrow an analogy from cooking, I want to spend more time in the oven without drying out the juices of looking.
Jenny Jaskey
Originally published in Mousse Magazine, December 2012
2/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Artforum
“Hasta Mañana”
Trisha Baga, Peacock, 2011, video installation with mixed media, 14 minutes. From “Hasta Mañana.”
“Hasta Mañana,” ABBA’s 1974 Swedish hit, barely cracked the charts overseas. But the sappy tune’s tale of a summer fling that
never fully blossomed—and the attendant pain of losing, pleasure of forgetting, and indifference one needs to move on—remains
universal. Though the organizers of “Hasta Mañana,” a group show at Greene Naftali, may not have had this song in mind, the doleful dirge is nonetheless a fitting anthem for the contemplative yet spirited exhibition. Employing current modes of art production
and an up-to-the-moment perspective, the five artists on view use the past to inspire soulful, empathic takes on digital technologies. A sense of handcraftedness upends technophilic idioms, revealing a sensitivity to what once was.
Ken Okiishi, not one to shy away from anachronistic practices, communes with one of his idols in his photographic series David
Wojnarowicz in New York, 1999–2001. Taken on a cheap digital camera, each pixelated image depicts Okiishi holding a cutout of
Wojnarowicz’s solemn visage in front of a quotidian millennial backdrop: a sterile Times Square subway entrance, Okiishi’s college
bedroom, or the imposing health club that replaced Wojnarowicz’s former stomping grounds on the Chelsea piers. (The project
rehashes Wojnarowicz’s iconic “Rimbaud in New York” series [1978–79], for which the artist posed in a mask fashioned after the
face of that famous poet.) The sentimental works offer Okiishi’s youthful laments for a faded New York that has only grown more
distant. But what does the past have to say to the present? “Cheer up,” according to Ei Arakawa, whose United Brothers, a collaborative group that includes himself, Das Institut, and his brother, Tomoo Arakawa, contributes BLACKY Blocked Radiants Sunbathed,
2011. The slideshow documents the artist’s return to his brother’s tanning salon, Blacky, in the Fukushima region of Japan in the
wake of the nearby nuclear crisis. Lying inside hulking tanning beds, Blacky’s tangerine-tinted regulars pose alongside the artist’s
adolescent paintings as images of soothing abstractions by Das Institut are projected onto their bodies. Arakawa’s therapeutic
performance protests the nihilism induced by global catastrophe with familial retrospection and an ample dose of humor.The exhibition delves into the past of our computer-mediated present via methods that once drew attention to themselves, but for many
artists today are almost second nature. Offerings by Scott Lyall and Helen Marten explore the ephemeral side of technology with
the digital machination du jour: ink-jet-printed wall adhesives (recently adopted for youthful effect by established figures, such as
Cindy Sherman and Louise Lawler).
1/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Marten’s vector drawing Some Civic Shades (Highball Hi Rise), 2011, mingles retro Mac icons with an assortment of clip-art graphics, ranging from an image of the Parthenon to a cartoon of a bread baker. Meanwhile, Lyall contributes large, pale, nearly monochrome gradient stickers that feel like shy cousins of Cory Arcangel’s plucky Photoshop abstractions.
Two recent videos by the clever, young, brassy video artist Trisha Baga carry the exhibition. Peacock, 2011, weaves a fantastical
narrative of immigration and discovery, juxtaposing footage of young people wielding machetes in the artist’s native Florida, the
sorrowful audiobook introduction of The Joy Luck Club, and stills of Baga frolicking around New York’s Liberty Island. Like Alex Bag
before her, Baga performs on-screen, though the character she’s portraying may be none other than herself, whether she’s smiling
and waving stupidly in disguise or distorting Big Spender with her slouching voice. Baga’s videos juggle equal measures of charming
playfulness (exemplified by a smattering of googly eyes popping on-screen and off within seconds), and earnestness so pervasive
it’s disarming. Though pop-cultural pastiche is nothing new, Baga’s unprepossessingly handsome aesthetic and homespun candor
imbue her work with an enduring honesty that rises above the din of the ADHD-addled art of today. This is how one updates the
present with the past.
Beau Rutland
Originally published in Artforum International, October 2012
2/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Fruits of the Forest
New York Trisha Baga: BODY LOOKING/LOOKING EMBODIED
Leaning into the passage of time, Trisha Baga’s work embodies the fleeting process of perception. Through time-based formats
such as installation, performance and video, her evolving practice is inherently sculptural. Baga’s dreamlike narratives are layered,
unfolding through material gleaned from collective experiences, such as weather patterns (El Niño), pop-cultural legends (Madonna), and the Internet (original film, video and screen-capture imagery). Juxtaposing a unique mélange of audio/visual content,
Baga manifests the imperfect seams of perception, constructing abstract sensibilities of what she often refers to as “the shape of
attention.” Utilizing transitional subtleties to choreograph momentary disruptions, she seduces the viewer into durational glancing, inciting the pleasure of looking. Audible footsteps––the voice or breath of the artist, a door closing––provide anchors in time,
engaging our attention, loosely.
Trisha Baga, World Peace, 2012. Kunstverein Munich, Munich (Installation views)
Courtesy the artist; Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
Considering the international audience Baga has cultivated since 2011 alone––exhibiting at Société Berlin, Kunstverein Munich,
Vilma Gold, London, and elsewhere––earlier precedents within the genre of performance provide context for her swiftly developing body of work. In addition to making her solo debut in New York City at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Greene
Naftali Gallery in November of this year, Baga is also currently participating in a group show at MoMA’s PS1.
Methods employed by the artist evoke strong connections to aspects of embodied compositional structure established by the likes
of composer John Cage and his counterparts. Composing language, as he did sound, for the first time in 1950, Cage debuted his
“Lecture on Nothing” to an audience at the Artist’s Club on 8th Street in Manhattan. In light of Baga’s developing body of work,
the legacy of this landmark event is significant. As Cagean-performance and Fluxus scholar Julia Robinson has noted, Cage’s lecture
“reveals what he is presenting asa template for a wider field of experience…[making] a space for changing technological demands
on the senses.” Quoting the lecture itself, Robinson highlights Cage’s dismissal of the subjective concept of beauty: “Beware of
what is breathtakingly beautiful, for at any moment the telephone may ring or the airplane may come down in a vacant lot.”
Whereas Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” evokes form through the content itself (language, providing a spoken model), Baga’s work
unfolds relationships between audio/visual elements, sustaining our attention through sensation and the process of multi-dimensional looking. Consciously activating notions of framing, the artist makes tangible the light of video projection reflecting onto
spatial elements, projecting meaning through presence, finding form in motion through sight/site. Light and shadow arouse momentum, providing compositional structure through patterns of experience. Extending beyond the video frame itself, in her 2012
World Peace, a water bottle obstructs the projector’s function, mediating visibility of the projection.
Projecting fourteen music videos of pop-legend Madonna through the centrally placed water bottle reveals its form in shadow.
Flickering light produced by the video’s motion dances across the shaped surface of the plastic bottle, projecting textural variations
in proximity, fragmenting representation. Using light, image and sound––similar to Cage’s use of language to structure his lecture
about nothing––the seams of Baga’s work provide a similar “template,” contextualizing perception through process.
Corresponding to the way in which Baga choreographs elements in Body of Evidence, projected histories within the context of
Plymouth, Massachusetts––the site where some of the first American settlers are said to have come ashore, and also where her
2012 Plymouth Rock is situated––mirror aspects of the artist’s nascent practice.
1/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
This video clip is taken by the author while visiting Baga’s studio in May
2012. The video cuts in midconversation shows Baga’s explanation
through action, and the accidental YouTube discovery of a version of Carly
Rae Jepsen’s song “tuned to barking dogs,” just before Baga receives a
phone call of her own. Maintaining her openness to everything around
her, Baga’s composition structuring is a constant process.
For Baga, the historical locality not only offers her notions of hyper-real experience, the on-site object––Plymouth Rock itself––provides the artist with an emblem for meaning. During a recent studio visit, Baga shared video footage collected during a follow-up
research tour in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Projecting the three-dimensional footage onto the wall of an ad hoc screening area in
her PS122 studio space (afforded through a residency program), Baga spoke about the ease of shooting video within the context
of tourist destinations like Plymouth. Calling attention to anachronistic elements in her video footage, Baga pointed out how the
bright blue rain ponchos worn by Plymouth tourists, layered in proximity to historical costumes worn by actors re-enacting colonial
life, created the perfect readymade stage, where everyone arrives prepped for experience.
Whereas linear narrative in the traditional sense unfolds trajectories of “meaning” constructed over time, Baga’s narrative sensibility assembles patterns of audio/visual content to utter resemblances, ideas forming through the motion of process. Her art-making
practice itself recalls Julia Robinson’s articulation of Cage’s attention to the changing technological demands on the senses. Not
only does Baga’s work reflect her generation of artists who regularly appropriate found material culled from the Internet, her studio practice is equally informed by her interactions with software applications, and even the slow-glowing status lights on her computer. Developing as an artist in proximity to Google image searching and iPhone video capabilities, among other examples, Baga’s
awareness to the hum of technology past and present suffuses her videoinstallations, and even some of her recent paintings, with
an unsettling familiarity, evoking the interactive process of looking. Technologically speaking: Baga’s perception is multi-lingual.
Her 2011 video installation Peacock layers audio/visual references to film projection, stream-lined in video form. Adding texture to
the smooth technology of video, Baga adds googly eyes and digital squiggles, tacking visual elements and related audio to impress
our perception with familiar sensations of scratched film or stray hairs interrupting traditional film projection. Likewise, software
designers use similarly humanizing techniques, sourcing dated technologies as a means to evoke something more tangible. Examples like the “film bin” option on Final Cut Pro software, or digitalized touch components on handheld electronic devices, allude
to tangible forms as a method to structure perception of fleeting activity and perception. Baga’s work reveals intimate glimpses of
related connective seams embodied in our ever-changing world.
Baga’s approach to art making is expansive. Employing what she refers to as a “strategy of distraction,” Baga has developed a
keen sensibility to timing and context, giving equal weight to marginal mishaps as focused intention. Imbuing her predominantly
ephemeral practice with seemingly tangible sensations, Baga embodies resourcing activities through experiential methods, learning-by-doing. Highlighting relationships in proximity, manifesting new ones, Baga questions the stability of narrative, memory and
perception of time passing. The slowly circular glow of screensavers and status lights viewed from her studio video-editing table is
just as intimately unsettling as it is comforting.
“My body is looking. Looking is my body. The touching things touch things, which touch my good looking things. They move me,
I break. They move you, I break. We move you, I break. Somewhere someone is trembling. I come back to your face, which is the
thing that so many other things are like, are looking like. Sway me salty like your face, you big perv. The sea is calling. You want it?
You got it, Toyota. (several seconds of silence) The seam is filled with common mortar––picture that.”
Meghan Dellacrosse
Originally published on http://www.fruitoftheforest.com/trisha-baga/, Autumn 2012
2/2
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Time Out London
Trisha Baga: Rock
Installation view of Trisha Baga, `Rock`at Vilma Gold Gallery - Courtesy Vilma Gold London
Trisha Baga´s elastic assemblies of gauzy video projections and floor-based tumbles of scattered objects feel both old and new. The
tone is one of aftermath, of great ideal on the slide: Baga´s camera records the beach at sunset, then splinters into randomness
- penguins at the zoo, dancers, bursts of Middle Eastern script, passages of abstract geometry. This comes projected over three
slouchy abstract paintings, while on the floor are a spraypainted boombox, a tripped-over plinth, tangles of cables. Don´t try to
make sense of it; rather, give yourself up to an evocation of fraying and dissolution. (MH)
Originally published in Time Out London, June 2012
Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany
+49 30 816 18 962 / contact@societeberlin.com
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Monopol
Trisha Baga – „World Peace“, Kunstverein München
„Eine logische Konsequenz aus der gegenwärtigen Verbreitung der Massenmedien besteht darin, dass der eigentliche Wert kultureller Erfahrung einfach durch die flüchtige Befriedigung ersetzt wird, die Besitztum mit sich bringt. Insofern konnte ein universelles
Konzept wie „World Peace“ („Weltfriede“) kürzlich als Kulisse für den Popstar Madonna fungieren – in Form einer gigantischen
medialen Landschaft aus Monitoren, die um ihre Bühne herum angeordnet waren. Eine solche Hightech-Veranstaltung ist weit weg
von den instabilen Landschaften aus einzelnen Projektoren, Wasserflaschen und reflektierenden Materialien, wie sie sich bei der in
New York lebenden Video- und Performancekünstlerin Trisha Baga (geb. 1985 in Venice, Florida, USA) finden. Und doch hat Baga
genau diese Formulierung, „World Peace“, als Titel ihrer ersten institutionellen Einzelausstellung im Kunstverein München gewählt.
Dahinter verbirgt sich die Einsicht, dass für einen Imagewechsel und die Neudefinition einer bekannten Trope ein Beamer und eine
Wasserflasche völlig ausreichend sind. Die Ausstellung „World Peace“ präsentiert fünf Videoinstallationen von Trisha Baga, die die
Ausstellungsräume durch die Verwendung ungewöhnlicher Materialien in atmosphärische Landschaften aus Lichtreflexionen und
Sound verwandeln. In ihrer Gesamtheit kennzeichnen sie die zwanglosen und in hohem Maße improvisierenden Vorgehensweisen,
mit denen die Künstlerin die Muster hinter der heutigen Bildproduktion untersucht, die sich aus fast drei Jahrzehnten Videoclips,
Dokumentationen, Konzerten und Interviews speist.
Trisha Baga steht für eine junge Künstlergeneration, die den konsumorientierten Aspekt heutiger Bildproduktion als gegeben hinnimmt und einfach die unendliche Zahl an Bildquellen, die das Internet und andere populäre Medien bereitstellen, anzapft. Dennoch besteht die Zielsetzung der Künstlerin nicht darin, die zunehmende Standardisierung der Bildproduktion in den heutigen
Medien offenzulegen. Ihr geht es vielmehr um das Thema Komplexität. Anschaulich wird dies, indem sie durch die Veränderung
des Präsentationskontextes immer wieder neue Darstellungsebenen und Blickwinkel bei der Entwicklung einzelner Videoarbeiten
hinzufügt. Ein bestimmtes Video kann dann als Lecture-Performance oder als Hintergrund für eine Karaoke-Performance fungieren
oder aber dazu eingesetzt werden, beliebige Objekte in einer Rauminstallation zu beleuchten. Diese formalen Adaptionen werden
von der Künstlerin dokumentiert und fließen ihrerseits wieder in das entsprechende Video ein.
Im Kunstverein München besetzt Baga den Raum, indem sie ihre Videoinstallation durch die Hinzufügung der visuellen Metaphern
Licht, Reflexion und Wasser in eine illuminierte Landschaft verwandelt. So zeigt ein Video mit geradezu dokumentarischer Präzision, wie Regen gegen ein Fenster prasselt (Rain, Video, 2012). In der Videoinstallation Body of Evidence, ebenfalls von 2012, nimmt
eine Wasserflasche das Zentrum der Bühne ein. Zwischen Projektor und projiziertem Bild platziert, verdeckt sie die Mitte der Projektion. Der Vordergrund verwandelt sich dadurch in den Hintergrund und umgekehrt, sodass das mediale Bild destabilisiert wird.
Trisha Baga lebt und arbeitet in New York. Bisherige Ausstellungen ihrer Arbeiten fanden unter anderem statt im PS1, Artist’s
Space, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Anthology Film Archives, Greene Naftali und Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York. Am 30.
März 2012 präsentierte sie im Cornerhouse Manchester eine neue Performance mit dem Titel Pedestrian Mysticism (www.cornerhouse.org).“
Originally published in Monopol, Spring 2012
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Blouin Artinfo
Trisha Baga : Rock
Baga is a young artist working mainly in video and performance. In terms of technology, plot and resources however, her approach
to making is inclusive, playful and highly improvisational, so that her practice begins to unfix such distinctions. Though precarious
by its nature, this tack also thrives on the possibility that arises when everything around becomes potential material for narrative
making.
Throughout her work Baga’s interests lie with the “common things” that surround us, using these, enthusiastically, to guide phenomenological compositions about the act of looking and recognizing and the potentiality that might lie in the gap between. Her
work could be described as foregrounding distraction as a methodology. The screen of her videos often becomes a surface in its
own right. Rarely treated with preciousness, filmed footage becomes rather malleable as it is covered with objects and filmed
again, subjected to screen effects, split, mirrored or flipped around to reveal a different surface, a different world, beneath. As such
her approach to narrative might be compared to the logic of browsing online and hyperlinks, and is one that admits the space to
drift, notice and find, with technological processes charting her course as she goes.
Originally published in Blouin Artinfo, April 2012
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
SOCIÉTÉ
Fouth Wall
Patricia Baga
January 7-30, 2011
Rectangle with the Sound of Its Own Making, 2010
Video, 28 minutes
Trisha Baga brings process art and arte povera to video in Rectangle with the Sound of Its Own Making, a video that comprises the
actions, sound and even the thought processes of working electronically. In this process she reveals the environment of digital life.
It´s not so clean and clear-cut, hardly a robot utopia, and hardly the vanilla space that our corporate providers would like it to be.
Never mind hacking through the back door. All doors are open, dangling casually from their hinges.
Baga´s title maps this piece onto Robert Morri´s early ´70s work, Box with the Sound of Its own Making, a small wooden box containing an audiotape of the sounds of the box´s construction. Simple and elegant, but beyond minimalism to process, and a suggestion that the clean objects of minimalism be brought back into the quotidian reality from whence they came.
In Baga´s video, the voices in the background are, of course, the sound of the video being made: conversations, brainstorming,
background sounds, objects being moved around or placed in front of the camera, laughter - not primarily a nod towards breaking
up the illusion of screen-based imagery, but more interestingly, a refusal of break up the elements of the process in the creation
of a seperate “object.”
The object, therefore is the space of the creation of the video. Of course it is much less cut and dried than that, as the 3-D imagery
allows the viewer to have different kind of encounter with the video space. The 3-D gesture is a generous one, as the space and
tone become gently expansive, giving the Rectangle volume and seeming to move it out just a little from the plane of the wall.
The gesture is like those of a homemade magic show; it allows poetics to emerge from within the process and the material of the
video´s making.
Originally published in Fourthwall, January 2011
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com