Banks Violette, installation views at the Gladstone Gallery

The summer blockbuster of the New York art world took a while to arrive. Banks Violette’s opening reception at Gladstone Gallery was expected to overflow with art and heavy metal aficionados, something akin to last year’s Matthew Barney show (also at Gladstone), where a line of spectators had spanned half the block. But when I showed up for the opening on the evening of June 28th, the doors were locked and a gallery employee was turning people away; a sign on the door announced that the installation was still in progress and that the exhibition would open on July 6th. Same goes for the concurrent show at Team Gallery, said the unpopular employee. Disappointed fans in band shirts milled about the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes and yakking on mobile phones. Some decided to check out more conservative art openings along Twenty-fourth Street to indulge in complementary beers.

Banks Violette at Team

A week later, on July 6th, I decided to try my luck again, this time hitting Team first, before heading back to Gladstone. The front door was cracked to reveal unassembled sculptural components strewn across the gallery floor. Violette – wearing a T-shirt that showed off his many tattoos – emerged to check on a painted cymbal drying in the sun. He told me that the Team exhibition wouldn’t be finished for a few days, that the Gladstone show was presently launched, and that “there will be no opening” reception.

Finally, after two false starts, both exhibitions are complete. Like most of Violette’s work, the new pieces allude to the death metal scene. His last exhibition in New York, a 2005 solo show at the Whitney Museum, consisted of a charred chapel frame and an unsettling soundtrack by incarcerated Norwegian metal musician Snorre Ruch; the piece referenced a rivalry between black metal bands in Norway that transgressed into arson and murder. A few years prior, his installation ‘Arroyo Grande 7.22.95′ (2002) told the visual tale of three teenage members of an aspiring death metal group who, in order to garner attention for their band, had slaughtered a female classmate in the California wilderness.

Banks Violette at Team

Violette’s simultaneous shows at Team and Gladstone continue the heavy metal aesthetic but without the journalistic narrative lode. Instead, he creates idiosyncratic storylines out of unseen events and melancholic landscapes. The prime unseen event was a private residency at Team in which Stephen O’Malley, of the drone doom band SunnO))), and absent Hungarian vocalist Attila Csihar recorded a soundtrack to be amplified at Gladstone. (Last year, Violette, O’Malley, and Csihar combined forces in an unseen live event at Maureen Paley Gallery in London). What remains at Team is a cataclysmic sculptural hangover of the recording session. Scuffmarks caused by equipment moving into and out of the gallery have defaced the glossy black floor. A remarkably decimated drum kit lies in ruin across the main gallery, each piece painted black with propane-fueled flames flickering from their tops (the fire itself was an event that ended a week after the show opened). Pristine acoustic panels made of bonded salt stand mockingly upright around the dead drum set, and a fluorescent-bulb billboard featuring an upside down Jagermeister logo – a liqueur romanticized by bands like Slayer, Metallica, and Pantera – fills the room with white light.

The smaller rear gallery houses a vigil scene: melted candles and a shattered bottle of Jack Daniels cast in pewter, which are hooked up to a refrigeration unit, the coldness creating frost and dew on the silvery alloy. Is it a shrine to a drummer who spontaneously combusted? Or merely solidified remnants of an all-night jam session?

Throughout the vastness of Gladstone Gallery, the sonic fruits of O’Malley’s recording residency blare from concert speakers in a three-hour audio loop. I have yet to listen to the entire soundtrack, but I’ve heard enough of the three-dimensional din to get the gist. Blasts of distorted bass jangle your nerves and dizzy your head; a spooky wind sound drifts between speakers; a guitar is strummed in long, dissonant chords; Attila Csihar vocalizes in dark, Germanic tones that combine Gregorian chanting with Tuvan throat singing. You will find the source of all this ambient noise in the small project gallery – three iPods and a mixing board in a black tour case, lingering under a grid of decaying acoustic wall panels made from, yes, bonded salt.

Violette has chosen as his leitmotif for the Gladstone show one of the most crucial, ubiquitous, and ignored elements of any rock concert: the stage. Each stage evinces organized chaos and perfect destruction. Shattered speakers cast in (again!) salt and resin have fragmented over a glassy black stage in the reception area; an identical stage next to it is an empty set awaiting our mental projections. In the back gallery, an aluminum wall transmogrifies from a grated order of twelve flat panels into a crumpled mass as it reaches the floor (This piece is a tribute to Violette’s late friend Steven Parrino, an artist who often crimped his work in unexpected ways). Behind the imposing wall, a tank of liquid nitrogen cools the surface of the aluminum, forming ice and condensation and, when climatic conditions are right, white vapor that spews from the crumpled folds. But the most epic pieces reside in the main gallery, where a sturdy structure of black four-by-fours and perpendicular fluorescent tubes cascades into a maelstrom of zigzagging lights and a jumble of black wires. Behind the light structure, a twelve-foot, refrigerated mirror wall reflects our shattered selves in frozen and exquisitely broken mirror panels; even the slivers of glass on the floor appear purposeful and elegant. Quite unlike the figurative sculptures at Team, each stage is geometric and minimal yet flawlessly flawed.

Across the concurrent shows, Violette conjures the ghosts of recent art history – Robert Smithson (salt), Dan Flavin (fluorescent lights), Sol LeWitt (monochromatic planes) – while preserving his own licorice tang and heavy metal roots. But to sustain the interest of the fickle, fad-hungry art crowd and maintain a long shelf life, an artist should develop a signature style without becoming a stagnant parody of himself. Thankfully, Violette has done just that. The pieces are sleek and heroic, a finely wrought collection of his favorite materials and iconography, mixed with the fresh dangers of propane and liquid nitrogen. Violette toes the line of self-parody without crossing over – all lusty, gloomy angst and heady metal.

Trent Morse

Banks Violette at Team Gallery and Gladstone Gallery, New York

at Team Gallery until 17 August
83 Grand Street, between Wooster and Greene
New York
T: +1 212 279 9219

at the Gladstone Gallery until 17 August
515 West 24th Street (between 10th & 11th Ave.)
New York, NY 10011
T: +1 212 206 9300