“On iPhone”
Video, iPod as postmodern fetish object
Performing Connection in the Arts: The Staging of Maya Shkolnik and Benedict Shakespeare’s “Immediate Art”
by Iker Veiga
by Iker Veiga
It’s August 9th in Morningside Heights, where New York-based Ukrainian photographer Maya Shkolnik works and resides. Around us, the crowd wields avant-garde fashion as a vindication of absolute self-expression.
“I sort of feel like I am in Berlin again,” my friend Manavi whispers to my ear as a horde of guests closes the apartment door behind them. Upon our introduction to Shkolnik and Benedict Shakespeare’s show, “Immediate Art,” both her and I note how instantly the art display turns its multitudinous audience into its first weapon for disruption. Here, the predominantly residential Upper West Side crowd seems replaced by a daring clout of up-and-coming interborough creatives: a choir of rising independent voices taking over the city’s artistic landscape. In this home unit, eighteen independent artists and a broad, audience of young people come together in a riveting, labyrinthic exhibit that seamlessly achieves its goal: to activate the social component of art, to reject fast-paced, standardized, and institutional consumption, and to invite the curators’ guests to rejoice in the closeness of these works. Through “Immediate Art,” artists and audiences alike are invited to perform real connection, opposing the theatrics of quiet, shallow art consumption replicated in white-walled galleries across New York.
“I sort of feel like I am in Berlin again,” my friend Manavi whispers to my ear as a horde of guests closes the apartment door behind them. Upon our introduction to Shkolnik and Benedict Shakespeare’s show, “Immediate Art,” both her and I note how instantly the art display turns its multitudinous audience into its first weapon for disruption. Here, the predominantly residential Upper West Side crowd seems replaced by a daring clout of up-and-coming interborough creatives: a choir of rising independent voices taking over the city’s artistic landscape. In this home unit, eighteen independent artists and a broad, audience of young people come together in a riveting, labyrinthic exhibit that seamlessly achieves its goal: to activate the social component of art, to reject fast-paced, standardized, and institutional consumption, and to invite the curators’ guests to rejoice in the closeness of these works. Through “Immediate Art,” artists and audiences alike are invited to perform real connection, opposing the theatrics of quiet, shallow art consumption replicated in white-walled galleries across New York.
“meta-Meta Commentary”
iPhone, tripod
Although the exhibit sprouts from Shkolnik’s encounter with Kornbluh’s text while living in the Lower East Side last summer, Shakespeare and Shkolnik’s collaborative effort started way back in their university journeys. In the fall of 2023, both of them took a Digital Photography course, through which they exchanged interests, from her gravitation towards Sophie Calle’s performance art and vulnerable photography to his interest in the intimate, self-contained documentary work of Englishman James Ravilious. Through the intersection and divergence of perspectives they identified between these artists, their art began to explore “how vulnerability, identity, and intimacy invert the gaze.” This interest in intra and interpersonal connection and its manifestation through social interactions around art and art spaces becomes evident in “Immediate Art.” The show stands as a field for experimentation, a complementary exhibition that elaborates on their individual concerns as first sparked during that school term, while searching for answers to the conundrum of attaining genuine engagement between viewers and their work, and in the arts as a whole.
This plurality of media, influences, and styles, is further explored through the collective identificatory processes of art consumption instigated by the hosts and some of the artists. For instance, Harley Jade Walker’s performance work directly strives to multiply responses to the art on display. Towards the end of the show, the artist required the audience to give up their link to the outside world (their phones) for an extended period of time. By putting these devices away from visitors, this performance forced the audience to surrender to “Immediate Art’s” demands: to become direct participants in the exhibition and to fruitfully engage with themselves, each other, and the works displayed.
Putting the show together was an amusing, thrilling endeavor for both curators, who had never organized an event of this scale before. They decided to set the show in Shkolnik’s new apartment in the Upper West Side without seeing it ever before (she “planned [it to be on] the day of [her] move-in”). Placing her home as an entryway to the city’s art world is a vulnerable act that sacrifices the curator’s privacy in favor of an element of accessibility lacking elsewhere in the city. Accordingly, the apartment, unfurnished except for a new couch and spare kitchen appliances, reminds us of a gallery space without fully imitating the barren nature of art locales in New York. Shakespeare states that in the show, visitors are faced with a choice: to transform the exhibition space, turning it into neither a living area nor a gallery, but a middle ground where conversation becomes a work of art in itself, or to leave immediately, replicating the dynamics artists face through social media platforms. Here, “Everything is on display. You are on display. Voyeurism takes place, and as a means to get out of the public eye you [must] spend more time with the works,” no matter whether you oppose or submit to consumption waves.
Benedict Shakespeare
“Untitled 2024”
Photography
“Untitled 2024”
Photography
Both the curators’ art and others’ (pieces mostly made during study abroad last Spring), these items brought diverging, even international perspectives into this New Yorker’s living room, proving that connection through art transcends spatial immediacy, serving as a collapse of notions of distance, and emphasizing conversation across borders and identities.
When asked about their favorite pieces in the exhibition catalog, Shakespeare brings some of these overseas works into the conversation, highlighting Kendall Bartel’s “Semana Santa” (Fujifilm x100f, Andalusia, Spain) series. Other favorites collapse different artistic boundaries, from Masuf Ahmed’s “Annihilation” (transformation, alien photography), to Beatriz González-Cotera’s “Genesis,” “Germina,” and “Armor piece” (steel and found materials). Shkolnik also highlights the immateriality of some of the works and their transitory nature, focusing on her friend Graeme’s piece, “Which was his entire, unedited camera roll [displayed] on a projector.” This work invited audiences to scroll through the artist’s unlocked device, blurring the lines between intimacy and connection in the digital age. Ultimately the exhibit catalog brought together “A wide range of people who have different tastes but [who] want the same things, such as freedom to do art in the way we want,” Shkolnik affirms.
In “Immediate Art,” everyone–from curators to artists and guests–takes part in a much broader intention. The exhibition itself exists as a transitory performance where genuine connection and conversation flourish as a rich, experimental centerpiece. Shkolnik and Shakespeare reflect proudly when looking back: “Leading up to the exhibition there was such a positive atmosphere from friends, and family–a real sense of communal excitement.” This positive anticipation was not undeserving. The show succeeds because of the commitment it drew between audiences and artworks, proving that with time, “not contributing will manifest itself into regret,” as Shakespeare states. “Immediate Art” is only the beginning of this duo’s collaborative enterprise within the arts, both Maya and Benedict “have an urge to do more.” And we will be watching out for them.
“Southside House”
Photography
“Untitled”
Photography
“Untitled”
Photography
“Untitled”
Photography