ART-PRESENTATION: The Propeller Group
Founded in 2006, The Propeller Group (TPG) is a collaboration between three multi-disciplinary artists based in Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles, Phunam, Matt Lucero and Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Their multimedia works use the languages of advertising and politics to initiate conversations about power, propaganda and manipulation, especially as they relate to fallen Communist dictatorships and the rapid rise of capitalism in Vietnam and beyond.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: James Cohan Gallery Archive
Through multi-platform work, collaborations with other artists, and their dual headquarters, The Propeller Group is able to integrate many resources and idiosyncrasies in their practice, which expose the strategies of the type of global agency their name suggests. The exhibition of The Propeller Group (TPG) at James Cohan Gallery presents the New York premier of “The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music”, a film work originally created for Prospect.3 New Orleans biennial in 2014. Also on view are 21 unique sculptures each featuring a collision of two bullets inside a block and the video filmed at 100,000 frames per second, “AK-47 vs. M16”, made in collaboration with Grand Arts, Kansas City and presented at Venice Biennale in 2015. “The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music” (2014) borrows its title from a Vietnamese Buddhist proverb, which calls for the playing of celebratory music for the dead. The film is a poetic voyage through the funeral traditions of South Vietnam and engages the striking similarity between these rituals and those from around the rest of the Global south, especially New Orleans. The film combines documentary footage of actual funeral processions along with vivid re-enactments; the film is a poetic rumination on death and the ways in which the living honor the dead. TPG explores, “The elusive butterfly effect—the theory of ‘non-locality,’ whereby two distinct phenomena affect each other across a vast expanse of space and time”. The film “AK47 vs. M16” (2015) can be seen as a continuation of “The Guerrillas of Cu Chi” (2012) and explores the history of the two most widely used assault rifles during the Vietnam War. These almost identical weapons represent the philosophical paradox inherent in the notion of opposing sides, as during the Cold War and Vietnam War. In a highly controlled environment overseen by ballistics experts, an AK47 and a M16 rifle were aimed at each other and triggered simultaneously to discharge their ammunition into a gelatinous block. The block is made specifically for ballistic testing to mimic the density of human tissue. The sculptures capture the moment of impact of the two bullets in what the artists refer to as the “stalemate of a moment…like a freeze frame”.
Info: James Cohan Gallery, 291 Grand Street, New York, Duration: 8/4-15/5/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 10:00-18:00, sun 12:00-18:00, www.jamescohan.com
