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    • XVII

      • Colleen Asper Labor with Rectangle
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom
      • Triple Candie Exhibition Preparations
      • Sean Raspet 2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD…
      • Owen Kydd Handheld
      • Dan Levenson Notes From Jessica
      • Julia Rommel Easy Tacker
      • Jordan Kantor MAN(ET/DE)GAS
      • Sreshta Rit Premnath The Last Image
      • OJO The Adventures of Nuclear Wad & How He Learned To Stop Dreaming
    • XVI

      • Julia Sherman Re-Claiming Susan B. Anthony
      • Robert Hult Hasidic Street Posters in Brooklyn
      • Runo Lagomarsino Pedro’s Story: An Unsuccessful Transatlantic Traveller
      • John Houck Pine Ridge: An interview with Jim Houck
      • Brian Zegeer Dragoman of Little Syria
      • Sidney Russell Kuna Yala Swag
      • Desirée Holman Outer Spaces: Part I
      • Faith47 The Unexpected Present
      • Carmen Winant Personal Best
      • Philip-Lorca diCorcia Red Bull Snake
    • XV

      • Jessica Green & Tom Griffiths Terra Incognita (A Video Game Folly)
      • Prem Krishnamurthy The People’s Representation: On Staged Graphics in Klaus Wittkugel’s Work
      • Cian O'Day N/A, or On the Dark Stores of Brian Ulrich
      • Yasmeen M. Siddiqui Avatar Gone Analog: Musings on The Bridge Project by Do Ho Suh
      • Emily Larned ARTS 02–2011: The Artist-Created Institution as Art Practice
      • Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier Interview with Metahaven
      • Aaron Kunin Space and Place in Two Video Installations by Amie Siegel
      • Tom Griffiths Interview with Barbara Griffiths
    • XIV

      • Colleen Asper & Justin Lieberman In Conversation
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report To The Committee On Periodical Group Exhibitions
      • Ryan Mrozowski & Mike Womack Before-Biennial-After
      • Kay Rosen Waiting for Michael Asher
      • Kate Gilmore Drag
    • XIII

      • Talia Chetrit Van Hanos’s Harlem Studio
      • Mieke Marple The Lives of Objects at The Suburban
      • Laurel Nakadate Island Light
      • C.D. Parker Draw Me a Pie Chart Powerfully
      • Alan Reid Despondent Babysitter
      • Lucy Kim & Leeza Meksin Art Crimes
    • XII

      • Anonymous On Looking at Nature: An Untitled Petition on Crapomimicry
      • Paul Huf Musical Box with a Dancing Ballerina
      • Lance Wakeling Voluntary Sculptures: Photographing the Unmonumental
      • David Kennedy-Cutler Possession Obsession
      • Nine Budde Stopping by at a Friends’ Place
      • Cody Trepte Untitled (Something Clever Here)
    • XI

      • Adam Helms Hirschhorn at Gladstone Gallery
      • David Scanavino Fact or Fiction
      • Jason Tomme The Voodoo of Robert Irwin
      • Kristin Posehn The Rocks of Rocklin
      • Joanne Greenbaum Decorating the Void: On Clay and Dirt on Delight
    • X

      • Jennifer Dudley Interview with Daniel Bozhkov
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report to the Committee on Decentered Practices
      • Shana Lutker Artists Are Not
      • Steve Cairns & Isla Leaver-Yap Blind Carbon Copy
      • Katarina Burin Rooms No One Lives In
      • Jonathan Bogarin What’s Your Context?
      • Sara Greenberger Rafferty Master of None
    • IX

      • Andrea Hill Fact, Factoid, Factotum
      • Nicholas Weist We’re Interested in Your White Horse
      • Tyler Coburn Ronnie Bass at I-20
      • One descends a short staircase to enter 2012, Ronnie Bass’s first solo exhibition at I-20. The staircase terminates in a foyer, cut short by the discerning head-tilt of a gallerista. The foyer is fronted, like a proscenium, by the white face of a wall. Choose your cosmogony, or your eschatology, or your god, or your myth: This is the bottom tier of Bass’s somber exhibition stage, and the frame for the contemporary epic soon to play out upon it.

        Ronnie Bass, Installation view, 2008. Courtesy of I-20 Gallery, New York.

        Morning and Night. Fathers and Sons. Life and Death. Bass’s beginnings, endings and in-betweens assume well-worn dualisms: reflexively so. His protagonists—makers and doers, entrepreneurs and hard-workers all—walk paths paved by stars and stripes, be they a Frick, a Lincoln, or a scissor-maker. And for 2012, Bass’s supporting cast of troubadours convene to sing of the latest alter ego forged on the anvil of American mythos: of Jeremy Eilers, an aspirant baker and first victim of self-making in the new millennium.

        A door is cut into the far side of the wall, giving passage to a small hallway. The press release would have this be “The Commemoration Room,” and the two painted portraits of Eilers on its walls would suggest him as its subject. These ghostly conspiracies of El Greco and Bass are differentiated by three appendages: Eilers’s arms, protectively folded atop each another, in Jeremy Eilers (all works 2008), and the titular prosthesis New, temporally rending Jeremy Eilers from its armless variant, Jeremy Eilers New.

        How has Eilers gone from the possession of his arms to the lack thereof? This is as simple and confounding a question as that concerning the passage of night to morning, a journey we sense might help Bass resolve the traumatic, causing-arms-less-ness around which his exhibition fitfully and lyrically turns. The hallway’s other aesthetic memorabilia provide clues: a dirt and wire mound on a pedestal, cooked in a red hue (Dirt Pile); an upside-down, hand-made flour machine arm, reapportioned as theremin (Theremin); and a foreboding digital print of Eilers, wrapped around this arm, that masquerades in its fat brown frame and canvas undergarment as a painting (The Accident). An accompanying flat screen plays 2012, a video set to the ambient, synth-heavy song “Systems Colliding,” which Bass composed and performs. This call-and-response tune efficaciously condenses volumes of Freud’s case studies, as a bedside Bass looks toward his father and inquires about the coming of the morning, then asks the night wind if the radius is dividing, and if his boys are awaiting him. One pauses to consider: just what is a radius dividing?

        Ronnie Bass, The Accident, 2008. Ink jet print on canvas, mounted on board. 5.5 × 7.5 inches. Courtesy of I-20 Gallery, New York.

        Even for a song as plagued by mythopoeia and patriarchal symptoms as this one is, the line cuts with a surrealistic precision that has the effect of abstracting all that follow. Insistent question follows insistent question; reprises double for compulsive returns; and the grieving process is given a sonic countenance: affective and forceful.

        The hallway opens onto a square theater, where wooden chairs angle, in rows, towards a small, elevated platform. Just above, a projected video slips between musical performance and epic cinema (The Sky Needs You Too). An instrumental announces the motivic structure of the songs to follow as an overture would a sword-and-sandals flick; the song “I Am Ready For The Day” pairs a Cardew-esque performance scene with footage of a distant, vertical structure, shown amid the silhouettes of hills and flat lines of clouds; and closer “The Sky Needs You Too” layers this morning landscape atop the three musicians, whose frontal, presentational composition here implicates—and therefore draws attention to their absence from—the actual exhibition platform.

        Interwoven throughout this last song are scenes of a young Bass teaching Eilers how to operate the flour machine, wrought in bright, well-lit tones to contrast this moment of early idealism with the shadowy mise-en-scène of 2012, and the funereal blacks worn by this song’s performers. By presenting the bookends of Eilers’s life and career, the contours of which are carved, with deliberate omissions, throughout the rest of the exhibition, The Sky Needs You Too provides a sense of closure and reassurance as seemingly sincere as it is deceptive. Like those of many men and women driven by the American promise of self-making, Eilers’s life telescopes the mortal and mythic spheres, and the various relics that populate this exhibition are both testament to the life of the man and indicative of his need to solidify a legacy beyond his time.

        In this light, the ambiguous identities of Bass’s self-makers discover a fitting medium in the pop song, a form predicated upon the transformation of personal emotion into mass-consumed platitude, and on the singer’s occupation of the intermediary field. His awareness of the genre’s psychical import recalls that of David Lynch, whose songwriting collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise gave a deadpan, melodramatic gloss to films and TV episodes composed of little else. Bass’s compositions are similarly unsettling: through their earnest embrace of the sentimental, they become symptomatic of the same confusion between lived and mythic time that consumes the artist’s alter egos. Yet far from serving to indict his characters’ aspirations, as a novel by Dreiser might do, Bass’s work ultimately seems to suggest this myth to persist in American culture for a reason, and for its full arc of success, upset, and possible tragedy, to provide a foundation for storytelling and a locus of personal reflection.



        2012, 2008, Video on DVD, 8 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.



        The Sky Needs You Too, 2008, Video on DVD, 8 minutes.
        Courtesy of the artist.

        Ronnie Bass was born in Hurst, Texas, in 1976. He received a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from the Columbia University. Upcoming group shows include “Ei Arakawa; Kiss the Canvas,” New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2008), and “Yes,” AR/Contemporary Gallery, Milan (2008). Past shows include “Artist’s Cinema; Our Land is Our Land, with Ronnie Bass,” Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2007); “Performa 07, The Second Biennial of New Visual Art Performance,” New York (2007); “Carte Blanche,” Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York (2007); “Salad Days—Second Course,” Artists Space, New York (2006); “North Drive Press—The Movie,” The Kitchen, New York (2006); “The Manhattan Project,” Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami; and “Greater New York 2005,” P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City.

        Tyler Coburn is an artist and critic based in New York.

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      • Allison Kave Doa Aly and Juan William Chavez
      • Gillian Sneed Interview with Adam Pendleton
    • VIII

      • Jacob Hashimoto Interview with Luis Gispert
      • Lilly McElroy Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg
      • Kevin Zucker Thematic Apperception Test
      • Ian Cooper That’s What He Said
      • Colleen Asper Interview with Matt Borruso
    • VII

      • Mieke Marple Interview with Michelle Grabner
      • Farrah Karapetian Reframing Mirrors and Windows
      • Ruby Sky Stiler That’s What She Said
      • Spencer Finch New Zealand Light
      • Dana Frankfort John Walker: Text in/and Painting
      • The Editors Whitney Biennial 2008
    • VI

      • Katie Herzog Bay Area Figurative Language
      • Matt Connors Teignmouth Electron by Tacita Dean
      • Connelly LaMar New Photography 2007 at MOMA
      • Ethan Greenbaum Inside Lights
      • Matthew Lancit Cleaning Magritte’s Pipe
    • V

      • Roger White Jay Heikes at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Interview with Michael DeLucia
      • Erin Shirreff Michel Auder: The Feature
      • Jessica Lansdon Interview with Brian Bress
      • Lisha Bai Suzanne Song at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
    • IV

      • Mariah Robertson Conditions in Time
      • Jacob Feige Psychopathia Pastoralis
      • Eric Golo Stone Interview with George Kontos
      • Skyler Brickley Keith Tyson at PaceWildenstein
      • Lumi Tan Curatorial Project with Jo-ey Tang
    • III

      • George Rush Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper
      • Jacqueline Cooper Margaret Wall-Romana at Bucheon Gallery
      • Ana Wolovick Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein
      • Skyler Brickley Nicholas Krushenick at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Peter Young at PS1
      • Ethan Greenbaum Daniel Gordon Interview
    • II

      • Christine Frerichs Rebecca Morris at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery
      • Skyler Brickley Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine
      • Ethan Greenbaum Kristen Baker at Deitch Projects
    • I

      • Mark Barrow On Abstraction
      • Tova Carlin Superstudio
      • Julia Weist Johannes Vanderbeek at Zach Feuer
      • Skyler Brickley Wilhelm Sasnal at Anton Kern
      • Ethan Greenbaum Cement Garden at Marvelli Gallery