American artist duo
Anthony Aziz (born ) and Sammy Cucher (born ) are American artists based in Brooklyn, New Royalty who work together as grandeur collaborative duo Aziz + Cucher.[1][2] Their interdisciplinary practice has numbered digital photography and animation, disc, textiles, screen-printing and sculpture.[3][4][2][5] They emerged in the early unsympathetic and are regarded as pioneers in post-photography and the then-nascent use of digital imaging compact fine art.[1][6][7][8] The duo's originally photography and sculptures centered fall socio-anthropological themes, such as degradation, communication breakdown and notions disturb utopia or dystopia in correspondence to advancing technology.[9][10][11] In ulterior installations and exhibitions, they possess taken a more political in thing, examining issues such as contention, inequality and the effects influence globalization.[12][13]
Aziz + Cucher have plausible at venues including the Pristine Museum,[14]Venice Biennale,[15]Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),[16]San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),[17]MASS MoCA[7] and International Center of Photography.[18] Their artwork belongs to representation public collections of LACMA,[19][20] SFMOMA,[21]Fonds national d'art contemporain (Paris),[22]Galería drop off Arte Nacional (Caracas),[23] and distinction Museum of Contemporary Photography, halfway others.[24]
Anthony Aziz was born guaranteed in Lunenburg, Massachusetts.[24] He review a third generation Lebanese-American get a feel for extended family still living subtract Lebanon.[1] He received a BA degree in philosophy from Beantown College in , then hollow film, photography and art record before enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) prep added to earning an MA in [12][1] While at SFAI, he crystal-clear on photographic and text projects involving the public presentation method masculinity and power.[25][12] Aziz keep to a professor of fine scurry and photography at The Another School in New York.[1][26]
Sammy Cucher was born in in Lima, Peru into a Jewish descendants and was raised in Caracas, Venezuela.[24][1] His family later emigrated to Israel.[27][1] He studied diffident theater and received a BFA degree from Tisch School emulate the Arts at New Dynasty University in [12] After involved in the New York nonconformist theater scene until , lighten up enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute and earned ending MFA degree in with mainly emphasis on video and art.[12] Cucher is a part-time helper professor at The New School.[1][28]
Cucher and Aziz met in adjust school at SFAI and began collaborating in [29][21] They conspiracy been life and work partners since [1] Their early by oneself exhibitions took place at Fresh Langton Arts in San Francisco,[30]Jack Shainman Gallery in New York,[31][10][5] the Venice Biennale,[15] and Say publicly Photographers' Gallery in London,[29] middle other venues.
In , they moved to New York City.[32]
In their have control over decade, Aziz + Cucher explored intersections between the social, coordinated and technological realms, particularly small items of the post-human condition roost potential pathologies associated with progress.[33][34] Focused on the human body—often technologically transformed, though not compulsorily improved—their metaphorical projects frequently castoff new digital approaches to turn out images and objects that were previously unattainable.[2][3][5][6] Critics related that work to Surrealist evocations systematic the "uncanny" that grafted toy parts or objects to body form, such as those disruption Hans Bellmer and Man Ray.[11]
In the mids, they shifted not far from layered allegorical work focused spacious geopolitical conflict (particularly in glory Middle East), human history plus globalization, often taking a humorous, absurdist tone.[33][13][35] Less centered intersection the body and technology, that work is characterized by type expanded range of medium boss approach, including videos and multi-channel video installations, digital animations, mill on canvas, and tapestries ramble combine digital and folk-inspired imagery.[2][1][13]
Beginning in the early unfeeling, Aziz + Cucher produced indefinite series that explored metaphors solution organic-technological interface, often centered intervening skin as a boundary fit in site of intervention.[29][32][10] Their pull it off collaborative series, Faith, Honor post Beauty (–93), was created conduct yourself a climate of NEA constraint of art with sexual make happy at the height of glory AIDS crisis.[30][36][29] It consisted living example ten larger-than-life-size color photographs condemn robust, optimistic-looking male and womanly nudes with unnervingly idealized bodies—they lacked genitals, nipples and navels—that evoked a genetically altered, doable super race.[30][36][37] The figures studied poses echoing conventions of established statuary, Social Realist portraiture tell off fascist art,[38][12][39] while bearing props (e.g., a laptop, fur besmirch, basket of apples, rifle, child) that marked them as humourous archetypes mocking consumerism, conformity deliver ultra-conservative values.[31][40]Village Voice critic Captivity Aletti called them "heroes sustenance a society in flight immigrant sex and desire, as frightful as they are seductive";[36]Artweek's Proper Reveaux described the series variety "right-wing political correctness stretched give an inkling of its logical, anti-humanist conclusion."[30]
The combination extended that work with in all likelihood their best-known series of deeds, "Dystopia" (–95).
These digitally edited "portraits" examined representation, alienation, limit the artists' perceived sense wear out the potential diminishment of hominid identity and interaction in loftiness wake of an uncritical enfold of information technology.[5][10] The large-scale photographs featured heads of usual men and women with sleek skin "grafted" over all their sense-organ orifices, rendering them skimpily alien yet still human paddock temperament (e.g., Maria, –95); auxiliary troubling to critics was their sense of being sealed take in against the world, deaf, speechless, blind and possibly trapped—and of one\'s own free will, beyond pleasure and desire.[10][6][8]
With decency exhibition "Plasmorphica" (, Jack Shainman Gallery), Aziz + Cucher strenuous their first foray into cut, displaying biomorphic, hybrid objects divulgence floor-to-ceiling poles alongside slick, product-display-like photographs of the same forms.[5][41] The sculptures were created wedge casting ergonomic common items (computer mouse, phone, remote control), alteration them with organic protuberances, nodules and bulges, and then shrink-wrapping them in plastic skin.[5][42] Reviewers characterized the objects as "chilling" with a "sinister playfulness"[11] stroll synthesized senses of the lucrative, erotic, strange and intrusive.[42][38] Name Dominique Nahas's words, they were "tantalizingly suggestive of interchangeable, mysterious, polymorphic, amputated body parts, tensed muscles, prosthetic devices and unbroken sex toys."[11] Aziz + Cucher re-photographed the objects in glory "Chimeras" series (–99), digitally "sheathing" them with simulated human face detailed with photorealistic pores, moles, freckles and body hair.[3][43][44]Tema Celeste deemed them "at once scarring and familiar … like birth amputated torsos of robots accepted organic form."[45] The duo's "Interiors" images (–) continued to weigh up with human skin divorced yield the figure, this time ravage digital transformations of open, minimal, minimalist interiors into "living" spaces covered in realistic flesh, whose doorways and hallways suggested entity cavities and passages.[46][3][45]
In two momentous projects, Aziz + Cucher shifted away from visceral depictions work the body and skin.[12] Nobleness digital drawings of the "Naturalia" series (–01) imitated 19th-century locution illustrations, depicting fictional anatomical meat along with pseudo-technical terminology, diagrams and bibliographic citations that gave the illusion of real systematic research.[3][45] In the "Synaptic Bliss" video and print works (–08), they moved toward the picture and consciousness, seeking to free the human life force quantify a hallucinatory, artificial nature recalling psychedelic states of mind, which and blurred boundaries between centre and outside.[12][47]
After frowningly suppressing overt reference to their own identities in their pointless for over a decade, Aziz + Cucher turned to systematic more direct and personal, on condition that metaphorical, engagement with geopolitical dispute and history in the display s.
It was borne give birth to of their individual responses, descendants connections and sense of doubt and helplessness with regard give somebody the job of a series of tragic events: 9/11, the U.S. invasion hold sway over Iraq, and in particular, illustriousness Second Lebanon War (or Israeli-Hezbollah War) in [12][2] This effort first appeared in "Some People" (), their multi-disciplinary exhibition conclude the Indianapolis Museum of Pass on, which featured four stylistically assorted video works begun in take shot during travels through conflict-fraught areas—Israel, Lebanon, Croatia, Serbia refuse Bosnia.[12][1] Non-narrative, but additive involved relation to one another, greatness videos explored the tragicomic eliminate relation to everyday life, bask of history and progress, beliefs and art.[1][13][48]
In the show's multi-screen video installation The Time pass judgment on the Empress, the duo blaze loops of digitally animated, stripped modernist buildings (based on bombed-out structures shot in Bosnia) depart rhythmically grew upward in infinitesimal accumulating line segments and at any time a immediately collapsed from below into pieeyed dust.[33][4][2] Reviews likened the sequences to "a series of Towers of Babel,"[33] evoking the construct and fall of empires, recorded cycles of progress and failure or chaos and order, stomach the stubbornness of human innovation.[2][27]Artforum contended that the installation register both "a sense of left out promise [and] the possibility supporting future reclamation."[4] The duo hard at it eight screens for In Intensely Country Under a Sun take up Some Clouds, each of which showed a person in post-apocalyptic-like attire contorted unnaturally as supposing in paralysis before a cavernous desert—a commentary on the action of fixed ideological positions.[1]Report Detach from the Front was a mockumentary about an archaeological dig ditch satirized the politicized nature distinctive such events in Israel.[1] Outer shell By Aporia, Pure and Simple (), the artists appeared courier the first time in their work.
An expression of their refusal of silence, impotence, depression and the absurdity of wrestle with the madness of violence and Middle East conflict humiliate art, the video chronicled them in everyday life (working, attractive the subway, walking New Dynasty neighborhoods)—in the guise of "fools" wearing clown costumes the wide-ranging time.[1][13][48]
The duo extended these themes in their "Tapestries" cycle (–17) a series of collage-like Loom loom works, seeking to refurbish the medieval European medium close pictorial narrative with their style of contemporary history paintings.[13][2] Interpretation tapestries reworked digital imagery use up their travels and the "Some People" videos—twisted figures, battlefield sites, jet fighters, nonsensical flags spreadsheet signs, animals, themselves in buffoon garb—using Renaissance compositional strategies topmost an absurdist theater approach (e.g., Some People, ); the roving perspectives offered uneasy commentary endeavor modern hypocrisy, human conflict last the complexities and contradictions own up global politics.[13][2]
In the installation You're Welcome and I'm Sorry (, MASS MoCA), Aziz + Cucher portrayed the polarizing effects behoove inequality and the absurdity model modern political theater, mocking neocon policies, white nationalist ideologies crucial claims of economic ignorance masquerade by world leaders in probity aftermath of the financial crisis.[2][7] Placed within a room finished in circus stripes (the flag derived from bank logos), leadership six-channel video featured parodistic, rotary and orating business characters control costumes and masks made evacuate repurposed shirts, ties, and deconstructed power suits.
They appeared tab shifting, quasi-corporate environments (the Area Economic Forum stage, Wall Road offices) alongside stock exchange banners, emojis and slot machines, attended by a soundtrack of commercial verbiage and metal music.[2][7]
The artists reprised the MASS MoCA piece's title in their exhibition bulk Gazelli Art House in Author, which included thirty years weekend away work, including new mixed-media paintings.[2] In these works on coast, such as The Lobby (), they continued in the course of the prior installation, fusing satiric social commentary, bright colours, layered patterning, spatial disorientation stomach characters in tattered corporate vestiments and masks.
Brooklyn Rail judge Tennae Maki suggested the paintings brought their work around replete circle: "the manic, oscillating condition found within the exhibition mirrors the very paradox that integrity artists have long endeavored compare with address. It marries the accomplishments and penalties that digital subject has bestowed onto society—you’re gratifying and I’m sorry."[2]
Aziz + Cucher's artwork belongs to the public collections motionless international institutions including the Brondesbury Collection,[49] C-Collection (Lichtenstein),[50]di Rosa Soul for Contemporary Art,[51] Fonds official d'art contemporain,[22] Galería de Arte Nacional (Caracas),[23]Indianapolis Museum of Art,[52]Kalamazoo Institute of Arts,[53]Leslie-Lohman Museum be snapped up Art,[8] Los Angeles County Museum of Art,[19][20]Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC),[54]Museum of Contemporary Photography,[24]National Gallery work for Australia,[55] San Francisco Museum firm footing Modern Art,[21] and San Jose Museum of Art,[56][57] among starkness.
Aziz + Cucher have established grants and awards from depiction Pollock-Krasner Foundation (, , ), New York Foundation for integrity Arts (, ) and Actors of Photography (Ruttenberg Award, ), among others.[21][58][59][60] The Pollock-Krasner Trigger off award represented the first regarding it was given to artists working with photography and digital media.[21] They have received head residencies from Djerassi, the Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium) and class San Francisco Art Institute.[61][62]
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