Suffused with fabricated romanticism, the heightened tableau of Happening by Avery Singer is an exemplary test.mes nt to the artist’s tongue-in-cheek digital idiom, which takes cues from both past and future to achieve a sense of monumentality and an acute psychological presence. Executed in 2014, the present work belongs to a seminal series of grisaille paintings that introduced Singer’s radically inventive visual vernacular, featuring prominently in Avery Singer: Pictures Punish Words, the artist’s 2014-2015 solo exhibition held at Kunsthalle Zürich. Singer combines computer technologies with modernist legacies to generate ersatz compositions of half-cyborg, half-human figures enacting enduring art world clichés. Standing at an immense scale, Happening echoes the larger-than-life bravado of the art historical tropes that it quotes, hinting at the unrealized narratives that lie just beyond the canvas’s frame and inviting the viewer to step into the surreal worlds Singer creates. With humorous vitality and technical virtuosity, Happening articulates Avery Singer’s highly original, avant-garde mode – a zeitgeist-defining contemporary sensibility that blurs the boundaries between painting and technology; digital and analog; reality and perception.

Produced following her training at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Singer’s Happening in part mocks the process of critiquing and creating art in all its earnestness. In Happening, four nude women – wearing only high heels and rendered in a blocky, simplistic style – peer at an empty easel, while a fifth lies on the studio floor beneath them. Satirizing the esoteric pomp and circumstance of creative expression, Happening exists in the same fictional realm as art historical mythologies of the Old Master’s studio or the Renaissance workshop. This impulse of Singer’s is not without art historical context of its own, as the title Happening itself shares a name with the antinarrative performance pieces staged by the avant-garde artists of the Fluxus movement, such as Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, and Yoko Ono. These Happenings, which took cues from Surrealism and Dada, explored the objectification of mundane movements and play-related activities, and the depersonalization of their participants. Here, the dynamic and gestural nature of the figures’ posturing injects an absurdly theatrical playfulness into the atemporal mise-en-scène, belying Singer’s sophisticated conceptual considerations. As curator Beatriz Ruf notes, “The insignias of ‘ Replica Handbags s’ collide with avant-garde tropes, and parodic autobiographical motifs constantly allude to cliches of the art world. Adopting a humorous tone, Avery Singer demonstrates rituals and social patterns and presents stereotypes of the artist, collects or, and writer. In this context, she adopts the historical loci of artistic production…where the myth of the artist and cult of genius are fostered. How are artists made?” (Beatriz Ruf cited in: Exh. Cat., Kunsthalle Zürich (and travelling), Avery Singer: Pictures Punish Words, 2015, p. 5)

Invoking the geometric forms of Constructivism, Futurism, and Cubism, Happening extends Avery Singer’s abstract and figurative sensibilities with its painterly mimicry of Internet-based aesthetics and digital imaging processes. Initial drafts of Singer’s scenes are conceived using SketchUp, a 3D modeling program, then projected onto a canvas and painstakingly rendered using masking tape and an airbrush in a meticulous process that serves to remove all traces of the artist’s hand. The fantastical composition of Happening is rendered in grisaille, and is further abstracted by the projected shadows that rake over every plane in order to emphasize the staged layers of illusion and reality that Singer constructs in her self-conscious parody of artistic production. Through this dimensional tension, paintings such as Happening open fictional realms that exist at the surreal interstice between the digital and material worlds, offering both an uncanny escape from contemporary quotidian reality and a humorous parody of it. Within the illusionistic precariousness of her paintings, Singer suggests the fallibility of not only the assumed and glorified power that art holds, but also the nature of metaphysical reality itself. Her prescient exploration of computer-generated realities collapses analog understandings of figuration, while expanding on modernist and surrealist notions of spatial logic. In artist Sven Loven’s exegesis on Singer’s beguiling visual vocabulary, he observes, “Through the lies of illusionism, the deceit of simulacra (depth of field, picture-in-picture, soft focus), [Singer’s images] seek to assure us of the validity of our own confusion in the face of cacophony. It is in this assurance that we can find comfort and peace, ground to stand on.” (Sven Loven, “The Cold Standard of Drifting Worlds” in: Exh. Cat., Zurich, Kunstalle Zurich (and travelling), Avery Singer: Pictures Punish Words, 2015, p. 5)

The earnest grandeur of artistic parade performed by Singer’s computer-age figures is undercut by the blatant surrealism of Singer’s abstract visual language, which conjures mimetic falsities while cutting to a cynical societal truth. By seamlessly synthesizing automated technologies and traditional painting techniques, Happening extends Singer’s singular aesthetic lexicon and subverts visual affectations to reinvent the enshrined genre of the painter’s studio scene. The fantastical atmosphere in Happening captures this absurdism within Avery Singer’s oeuvre and evinces the very best of her conceptual painterly practice, which posits a new place for the traditional medium with a technological dexterity and satirical wit, tailored for the Internet age.

Artist

Avery Singer