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Review of Hana Yilma Godine’s exhibition, “A Brush in the Universe,” running concurrently at the Rachel Uffner and Fridman Galleries; closes March 2, 2024
Who: Hana Yilma Godine
What: Exhibition, “A Brush in the Universe”
Where: This is a two-gallery show running concurrently at the Rachel Uffner and Fridman galleries in the Lower East Side
When: January 13, 2024 to March 2, 2024
Bottom Line: I’m going to go over one thesis in the show, but there are others
Introduction
Hana Yilma Godine’s exhibition is now going on until March 2, 2024 concurrently at the Rachel Uffner and Fridman galleries in New York City, respectively.
These works are called paintings, but they have elements of sculpture and fashion. These are large and ambitious paintings, with the kind of courageous originality that likely makes viewers feel at ease being courageous and original, too. There are very many themes and ideas in this exhibition, however this essay will focus on the use of fabric in Western Art and why Godine’s works in the present series both fit the narrative and break the mold. The important concession is this story is not the only one. Rather, the thesis-in-context is just one of many others.
These Works
These are paintings. As is the custom in fine art, Godine takes stretched canvas over wood, paint, and uses a brush to apply paint to the canvas. But that’s just the start. These paintings also protrude like sculptures, or use colored fabrics instead of paint. Fabrics of course are more often associated with a third aesthetics category, which is fashion. And indeed these fine art objects often have female figures who are beautiful, and strike stylized poses. None of these paintings would be out of place in a fashion magazine, in other words. The exhibition is titled, “A Brush in the Universe,” as a conceptual play that the artist herself or as per the artist’s statement in the Rachel Uffner Gallery press release, a metaphor for a woman’s body. The jailbreak here is if Godine uses all fabric, she can make a whole painting without paint.
Art History 1
Now, to build the thesis of the present essay, the camera has to zoom out a bit. In the late Middle Ages, specifically in the 1500’s and 1600’s, artists got their jollies painting fabrics. Genre paintings in these centuries took off and seem in hindsight similar to blockbuster movies everyone goes out to see at a theater, in the present day. Just like the explosion of knowledge, economic trade, and, uh, consciousness (read: the definition of Enlightenment), the boom in aesthetics coincided with slow moving booms [sic – awkward wording on purpose] in world trade, philosophy, science, agriculture, and humanity in general across the board. I myself took a backdoor into Renaissance-Enlightenment art from an obsession with philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who was born on my birthday, looks identical, was Jewish like me, all in Old Amsterdam.
Art History 2
Enlightenment luminaries like Spinoza are one of those parallel booms with what art historians call the Dutch Golden Age of Art because the Netherlands hosted so many awesome painters in such a small country, all at the same overlapping timespan. The parallels to New Amsterdam, also known as New York City, in the present day are myriad and vast. So, suffice to say, the canal system worked sort of like a highway; people from different nations collided together like an MTA subway car; and international trade was international trade of the present day. In a way similar to the New York City two-sided coin of art and finance, all of the money and trade created artists.
Art History 3
And one can twist that again, and at the very least make a joke saying artists in Amsterdam in the 1500’s and 1600’s were around fashions enough to paint them, and be interested in them. But according to the Smithsonian Curators for their 2013 Dutch Golden Age Show, the fine painters, aka fijn schilders, would compete by adding more verisimilitude to their painted fabrics in the scenes. They would add more folds in the curtains as a sort of competitive one upmanship, dueling banjoes. The genre in Genre Paintings is actually plural genres. This guy painted a lady in a window, and the next guy painted a lady. But in this game of salesmanship, the second artist adds ruffles, to break away from the pack, just a little. Ter Borch and Jan Steen have more detail than Pieter Brueghal the Elder a hundred years before, but the two latter contemporaries also have diverging styles regardless of whether their subjects are the same.
Rock Bands, Platonic Idealism
The use of canvas fabric for paintings was definitely part of the newly formed international trade, and fabric is cheap enough and coarse enough that one would prefer not to wear it, among several trade-related reasons. On the other hand, the rule that one must use canvas to make a painting is empirically untrue – there’s neither a law of physics nor biology saying a person cannot use a piece of velvet or cardboard instead – that the rule looks more like a useful tradition that’s also easy; a fashion that just started and kept going the way that solid technologies and philosophies stick around for a long time. It’s sort of like rock music, where guitars are the fashionable tradition, but you could conceptually switch in a piano for a guitar, rap music for rock music, analogue drums for digital drums, or so many others.
Platonic Idealism 2
This is a loose interpretation of ancient Greek Philosopher Plato’s idealism. A somewhat weird example I think of is the Disney movie, the Swiss Family Robinson, where the family makes an automobile out of coconuts, or whatever. The steam punk universes in fiction often have the same idea, and it is non-trivial that humans closer to real life can swap out gasoline-fueled engines for electric ones, and still have a car. In Godine’s works, you can have a painting without paint, by using colored fabrics instead. The fabrics in these paintings often actively break the fourth wall, as material objects coming toward the viewer, like in the case of the woman’s dress in, “Single Painting #4” (2022), possibly referencing Gustave Klimt. Alternatively, in separate paintings at each gallery, Godine switches stretched canvas for a clear translucent — if tinted — stretched plastic.
(yellow) Hana Yilma Godine, Single painting #4, 2022, oil and fabric on canvas, 80 x 80 in (203.2 x 203.2 cm)
Post-Proto-Authenticity
There is an old dad joke that goes, when a child brings up a new cool idea, the dad responds, “I invented that. “ The joke is harmless fun, but also encapsulates a loose trend in the current moment – that is, to think deeper about where aesthetics and aesthetic ideas come from. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ just-passed show, “Behold,” seems to tacitly argue with Pablo Picasso’s Cubism; that Campos-Pons authentically is African by ancestry and heritage, where Picasso’s African Cubism meets an actual, real life Afro-Cuban. Likewise Kasmin Gallery’s 2023 show of Diana Al-Hadid this past month was by a real Syrian, instead of the romanticized paintings of the Middle East in the 19th century by Delacroix, Degas, and so many others. Here, Ethiopian Culture certainly has claims for authenticity in international trade, fashion, and fine art. Kicker and a llama to boot? Science writer Michael Pollan has said the Enlightenment at large might have been influenced by importing Ethiopian coffee. https://nypost.com/2021/07/17/how-coffee-fueled-the-enlightenment-and-the-union-army-victory/
Metonymic Allusion
In my second review of Willa Cosinuke’s 2023 show, I coined the term metonymic allusion as a dry pun – intentionally not funny – on the term optical illusion. A metonymic allusion is an optical illusion that tells you it’s an illusion, which would be an anti-illusion. In the present exhibition, Godine is maybe doing her own metonymic allusion, similar to Cosinuke. Cosinuke used the idea of 2×4 lumber, and painted the subject with a different critical lens in each aesthetic object. Cosinuke might reference Christianity in one of her works, like the crucifix of two crossed pieces of wood; where maybe at the edge of another work she reveals some of that second work’s actual physical lumber skeleton. Here, in Godine’s works, the style is so uniform between all works, that realities weirdly cascade. The other physical dimensions echo like a mirror mirroring a mirror, going from physical dimensions to conceptual ones, Bro.
Gallery view courtesy of Rachel Uffner Gallery Staff.
Some Conclusions
But that’s my take, just one idea to think about in a big show with many ideas from the artist and her viewers, and other places ideas are from. I realize I am alone with inanimate objects in the gallery but these paintings make me want to say it’s fun to talk to her. If “Single Painting #4,” references Gustav Klimt’s, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,” for its gold, and model’s seated reception, it’s nevertheless non-trivial here the artist’s model in Godine’s work is reading a book, say, or sitting on a couch as opposed to a wicker chair.
Because you can’t rock on a wicker chair, as you all know.
Jacob Goldbas is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. In 2010 he graduated from NC State University, studying under Neo-Kantian Michael Pendlebury. In 2013 he won the Washington DC Jewish Community Center Award for Excellence in Essay Writing for their Fall Literary Festival. His brother Sol Goldbas is a jazz pianist, living in Mississippi. His sister Paige Saez is an artist and technologist living in California.
Review, “Hiroshi-me-me-me,” at Theater for the New City; closes January 28th, 2024
JACOB GOLDBAS REVIEWS HIROSHI-ME-ME-ME
Theater for New City
Crystal Field, artistic director for Theater for New City
Natalie Menna, writer
Brad Fryman, as Hiroshi
Natalie Menna, as Roberta
Holly O’Brian, as Sara
Directed by Robert Hendricks Simon
Produced by Robert Greer
Stage Manager Jose E. Ruiz
Lighting Design by Alex Bartenieff
“Hiroshi-me-me-me,” is a new play that tells the story of a love triangle between the titular character, Hiroshi, his two lovers, Roberta and Sara, and the consequential plot. After Hiroshi breaks off a very short fling with Roberta, Roberta talks to her best friend and therapist Sara. In a rage, based on that conversation, Sara then marries Hiroshi. This essay will go over the events of the play in more detail, and give some basic philosophical criticisms.
“Hiroshi-me-me-me,” begins with the characters Roberta and Hiroshi. The two engage in a classic banter of two lovers. Where Roberta wants to maintain ties by whatever means necessary, including a sweater she purposely left at Hiroshi’s home, Hiroshi wants nothing more than to get rid of Roberta. Roberta then calls upon her best friend and therapist Sara to try to understand why Hiroshi was so quick to run away. All the while, Sara works to explain her own trauma, as her fiance Seth has jilted Sara; and vacated their relationship for better things.
In the second act of this play, Sara marries Hiroshi, only to find out Hiroshi is an unfaithful lover. In summary, Hiroshi is as bad as Roberta expected, however this sentiment was lost to Sara, as Roberta is so very narcissistic and self-involved as to completely muddy this fact. Sara is revealed as complicit in her own failed marriage to Hiroshi, because she did not put up boundaries between herself as a professional therapist to both Hiroshi and Roberta. While Roberta is indeed self-involved and narcissistic, the narcissisism of both Sara and Hiroshi is their own undoing.
“Hiroshi” uses a number of well-established theater traditions in order to achieve its aims. In the play’s second act, Roberta’s memory of Hiroshi appears as the actor in a fedora hat. Theater fans may recognize this trick from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” when the eponymous hero’s best friend Banquo appears to haunt his friend. Likewise, the dance-wash scene changes of “Hiroshi,” whereupon the three characters dance and change clothes, is a known improv comedy theater motif, that improv comedy actors might employ to completely change scenes and ideas in a long-playing sketch.
Roberta is undeniably delusional, what the current Generation Z on TikTok might call, “De-loo-loo.” And the play reveals this in so many ways, not least of which by giving Roberta too many lines at the expense of Hiroshi and Sara’s reasonable objections. The genius of this play is the revelation that Sara and Hiroshi are just as unreliable and self-centered as Roberta. Sara is culpable as a compromised therapist who should have maintained boundaries, but Hiroshi leads both women on. Thus, all three are to blame.
This is an extremely unfunny comedy play, but maybe that’s a strength. Shakespeare is again relevant, beyond, “Macbeth,” and this play borrows from, “Much Ado About Nothing,” “A Comedy of Errors,” and perhaps, “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.” Nevertheless, Shakespeare is famously not funny. In Shakespeare, as in this work, the moral sentiment at any given time is more important than the humor. When Mercutio, in “Romeo and Juliet,” makes the profound joke, “Tomorrow, you will find me a grave man,” the pun is cheap. That pun is, a person becomes more serious – grave – as they grow older – closer to the literal grave, because all men die, and in the play, Mercutio was mortally wounded. In the present case, the obvious jokes reveal a more profound connection between depression and narcissicism.
Capitalism in the present day obscures the connection between narcissicism and depression. Corporations profit from the individual content creator, such that they might make the reasonable jump and say they are to blame for not competing with their social media cohort. Such an individual, just like this show’s three main characters, may then mistake their own shortcomings as universal, that maybe here Roberta’s feelings are the same as Sara’s feelings, or Hiroshi’s feelings. And they are not, but ultimately the pretense means Roberta, and her friends, have a difficult time telling the difference.
Hiroshi’s peroration toward the end of the play is a supreme and well-written red herring. The character chews out his soon-to-be ex-wife, Sara, the compromised therapist, and even mentions Walt Whitman’s eulogy, “Oh Captain, My Captain,” as an over-the-top (read: absurd, and purposely non sequitur) lament for his marriage to Sara. But, come on! Hiroshi cheats on Sara. The objective actions are more important than the subjective interpretations because Hiroshi does not love Sara, and he has done an objectively bad thing by ruining his marriage with adultery. This monologue builds the play’s thesis that there are indeed actions that overshadow – and matter more – than the vicissitudes of fleeting emotions. You did a bad thing, man.
At last, this play reads like the writer’s own journey, maybe about her friends, but ultimately about a character’s journey from solipsism to a more worldly consideration, including her immediate friends. Audience members have clear signals for where this production goes, what it means. Roberta is a proxy for the writer – however so humorous – and also the audience. The famous writers’ prompt, “Who am I? Who are they? What happened? What changed?” is clearly delineated and answered, because at the end of the play, Roberta is able to assess that Hiroshi hurt Sara, and that she, Roberta, does not want to date or marry Hiroshi. At the end of the play, she has changed enough to say no to Hiroshi.
And all that might have some sort of family ties with the rhetorical technique of adynaton. Adynaton is when a rhetor makes an impossible statement for emphasis in speech. The most famous of these might be, “When pigs fly,” as an impossible expression meaning some thing X will not happen – more than obviously. But check out Pink Floyd’s ballad, “Pigs on the Wing,” from the band’s 1977 album, “Animals.” The singer, Roger Waters, says, “If you didn’t care, what happened to me, and I didn’t care for you, too…we would zig zag away…” In other words, if the writer, or the characters, or by extension, all of us, did not care, there would be no play, or criticism, or maybe even human characters at all to make such conclusions. The whole thing of caring is bedrock.
Happy Face Plus
January 18th to 28th
Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8pm
Sunday Matinees at 3pm
Theater for the New City
155 1st Ave
New York City, New York
Show web page on theater’s website
Jacob Goldbas is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. In 2010 he graduated from NC State University, studying under Neo-Kantian Michael Pendlebury. In 2013 he won the Washington DC Jewish Community Center Award for Excellence in Essay Writing for their Fall Literary Festival. His brother Sol Goldbas is a jazz pianist, living in Mississippi. His sister Paige Saez is an artist and technologist living in California.
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