CASPAR DAVID SEANCE
Opens: Friday, Nov 18, 7–9pm
Jody Ake, Fia Backstrom, Olivia Barr, Mia Brownell, Andrea Cote, Matthew Fisher, JJ Garfinkel, Ann Hirsch, Lars Kremer, Adela Leibowitz, Anne Arden McDonald, Anja Mohn, Alexandra Newmark, Kelly Sturhahn, Ruth Waldman
Location: 487 Driggs Ave,
between N. 9 and N. 10
Dates: Nov 18–Dec 18, 2005
Hours: Thurs–Mon, 12–6pm
Contact: Info@JackthePelicanPresents.com
718-782-0183
Caspar David Séance attempts to recover our naive and dark Romantic mysticism from the flat precociousness of the New Age. We want it back. A roots-Gothic exhibition, its subject is the velvet black, hysterical connection between Eros and Thanatos—in other words, sex and death (without all that sex and death). Prepare to piss your pants in fear.
The fifteen artists cast shadows back into the past—through the ghosts of Edwardian Spiritualism and the refined Victorian rituals of death and mourning—to German Romantic David Caspar Friedrich (1774-1840), whose hyper-eerie paintings of iceberg shipwrecks and sublime mountain vistas and lone monks in the woods are among the 19th-century’s most haunted.
The Gothic stages itself in the past or in the forest ruin where children encounter strangers. Or, for many of us, as early adolescents in the darkness of the cellar. —We, and those like us across America, sat in Séance together in basements or attics, in candlelight or with flashlights, whispering in reverence and giggling nervously to taste the power of the supernatural in the stirrings of our own unfamiliar sexual feelings.
Possible at any moment was the sudden howl of an angry ghoul we accidentally ripped free of its moorings in the netherworld. (Is that Dad? Are we being naughty?) But more likely was the dumb "scare" joke or the innocent screech burst of virgin fear. The unspeakable—
budding sexuality, not least—lives in the margins.
The fifteen artists in this show are keenly focused on what happens in the silence between anxiously self-conscious eruptions. Their works, haunted in a still and quiet way, are intensely straight-man, deadpan and laughter-deferred—like good players of the Ouija—and are mostly and notably shy of the grotesque or overt sexuality or contemporary camp and glam-rock-inspired varieties of the Gothic.
Characteristically, this genre keeps humor at bey. Which, as the German Romantics of the 19th century realized, is why it can be so funny. Its playfully loaded insistence on having—or at least pretending to have—faith in ‘a something beyond’ contrasts sharply with Pop's pretence of asexualized, no-nothing innocence.
The exhibition aims to evoke the spirit of Caspar David Friedrich. In addition, we will be contacting him in earnest with invitation-only séances throughout the course of the show, under the direction of world-renowned psychic Jackie Barrett, fresh off her nationally-televised séance at the house of Lizzie Borden.
