Baldanders

This is the second in an ongoing series of performances in which artist, educator, and writer Andrew Woolbright considers the format of interview as a form of sculpture. The series' title, Baldanders, references a German mythical figure, Baldanders, who changes its physical form the longer a conversation continues. Woolbright’s multimedia performance involves prosthetics, video, and sculpture that shifts the conversants into new forms over the course of their conversations, inviting painter Angela Dufresne and sculptor Andrew Ross. Together, these sculptural conversations attempt to directly materialize the protean and parliamentary nature of discourse, and abbreviate the circulation of their ideas into flesh. Though framed as conversations on the disciplines of painting and sculpture, both address the ways in which authoritarianism manifests control within aesthetics and maintains civilian ability to respond to power. Woolbright's Baldanders series aims to develop an archive in real time by sourcing physical forms for the language used by the conversants. Sitting in the gallery is a wunderkammer cabinet made by the artist that functions as both a makeup drawer and a bibliography. The case displays texts, sculptures, and artworks sourced from the research that went into each conversation; along with a vitrine that is filled with cast faces of previous participants.

Central to the installation is two performances initiated by Woolbright. The first, Dubious Machines, invites painter Angela Dufresne, who will have makeup and prosthetics applied to her to speak as the feminist theorist Shulie Firestone to address contemporary painting. Woolbright is responding to Dufresne’s Firestone as the Dadaist Francis Picabia, to meet her cyberfeminist response to authoritarianism with a series of dubious machines. Dufresne and Woolbright will discuss the the airless spaces of authoritarianism that confine and maintain our mobility, while generating theories of possible solutions through the interface of painting. These anti-Freudian “dubious machines” of paintings, will discuss of the work of Dufresne, Shusaku Arakawa, Irene Zurkinden, Dona Nelson, Larry Rivers, Alice Neel, Lari Pittman, Viviane Browne, Walter Price, Hermann Nitsch, Iva Gueorguevia among others, along with the continued importance of Mannerism as a political force.

The second conversation, Objects to Bear Witness, is with sculptor Andrew Ross, who will appear as the theorist Jean Baudrillard and address the current state of sculpture. Woolbright will take the form of skateboarder Bam Margera, to answer his metaphysics with physics. In Objects to Bear Witness, Ross and Woolbright will generate theories of sculpture through metaphysics and physics. Together they will see the history of sculpture through its ability to bear witness to events and embodied experiences, while examining the limitations and dictates of space on sculpture. They will question power through what Ross refers to as, “god-mode sculpture” and see the ways that sculpture can allow us to experience the world as an artificial model. This conversation will discuss the work of Ross, Erwin Wurm, Sanford Biggers, Aria Dean, and Charles Ray, among others, and work that demonstrates an anti-narrative form of tableau that reveals the process of its making.

On going throughout the installation, Woolbright will independently spend three days in the gallery in prosthetics and makeup making alla prima LARP portraits of visitors. As William Blake, he will be making watercolor portraits of them mixed with angelic and demonic imagery; as Francis Picabia, he will be making oil paintings of them mixed with impossible machines; and as Bam Margera, he will be making spray paint and oil paintings of them mixed with famous car crashes. Each day of marathon painting will take the often romanticized and sincere notions of portraiture into the language of durational performance, irony, and LARP.

Baldanders is a trickster, mimicking the baffling role of the artist/critic. This series of performances further contaminates this dual function, possessing the genealogy of artist/critics such as Donald Judd, Adrian Piper, Martin Kippenberger, David Salle, and Mira Schor among others, with the dramatic and ironic thresholds of persona and performance. Taking it further, Baldanders questions the limits of this boundary, proposing criticism as its own form of artistic practice, specifically, a durational form of public sculpture that resists legibility and all attempts at controlling its form.

Andrew Paul Woolbright (b. 1986) is an artist and critic living in Brooklyn, NY and is an MFA graduate from RISD. Woolbright was a resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program and has recently exhibited with Anton Kern, NY; Harkawik Gallery, NY; Rachel Uffner, NY (2023); Microscope Gallery, NY (2022); Hesse Flatow, NY (2022); The Hole, NY (2021); Galerie Valeria Cetraro, Paris (2021). His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Eyebeam, The Brooklyn Rail, and his work is in the collection of the RISD Museum. Andrew is Editor-at-Large at the Brooklyn Rail, and director of the gallery Below Grand.