Robischon Gallery is pleased to present the collaborative, New York duo of Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick who return with an on-line presentation of their exhibition entitled “Madame Lulu’s Book of Fate.” In the encompassing installation, Kahn + Selesnick’s theatrical characters animate the narrative once again in photographs, tarot and augury drawings, sculpture and a large-scale painting of the central carnival character, Madame Lulu. As in previous visual chapters, “Madame Lulu’s Book of Fate” expands upon the imagined purposes and roles of magical, ofttimes mystical, entertainers belonging to the company Truppe Fledermaus (Bat Troupe) and the artists’ overarching series “The Carnival at the End of the World.” Curiously timely, the troop returns once more to reveal flashes of a collective future that seems increasingly uncertain and perilous.  

With typical Kahn + Selesnick subversion, the artists’ elaborately staged tondo photographs embrace the guise of the carnivalesque in the spirit of operatic vaudevillian performers, harlequins, ribald talismanic animal-men, sorceresses, and the wisdom of silent, but insightful mummers. In the related series of works on view, up is down; left is right; fools flourish and ignoble royalty rides a flea-bitten and deflated beast anonymously blending in among masquerading masses. In the disruption of the social order, truths not dared uttered in the regular world are freely spoken since disguise and subterfuge unleash an equalizing relief in the upturned social order within the series, just as in human history, the various pagan festivals, celebrations and holidays have done across cultures for centuries. The lavish costumes, puzzling theatrical performances, absurd predicaments, inexplicable ambiguous encounters and ritualized dance of “Madame Lulu’s Book of Fate,” suggest a topsy-turvy world where, in fact, what seems most peculiar might actually be truth. 

In the exhibited circular photographs, there is an unmistakable undercurrent of transformation including: in Butterfly Man, a charcoal man and his fluttering black insects swarming in a field of healing echinacea, button-masked skeletons leading a panoramic procession toward inevitable death in Danse Macabre, and for Bonsai, a giant’s hand safely thrusting a boat above the sea containing the artists’ designated “last tree.” Madame Lulu’s Carnival at the End of the World tarot character costume drawings display inimitable Kahn + Selesnick twists on the emblematic cards of divinatory significance. Major Arcana figures such as The Emperor, The Hermit and Strength, a woman with her head in a lion’s mouth, appear alongside the artists’ complex versions of the minor arcana of swords, pentacles, wands and cups. The symbolic meaning of each is amplified by the artists’ curious imagery with figures made of arrow-pierced packages, locket portraits, wheat and more. Painted terracotta sculptures of tarot figures, eyeball masks for blind giants, mythological sirens who lure mariners to their death with irresistible lyrical song, along with other arcane hand-sculpted objects for prognostication line the gallery ledges. And the sensitively rendered, round augury drawings expand the artists’ embrace of the unknowable with a portrait face transforming into a swan in Swan Rooster Chimera Augury, a barn owl flying above nine tail-knotted rats in Rat King Augury or in the eyes and ears of the Ex-votos Augury, an ex-voto being an image or object left as an offering in gratitude for recovery from injury or illness. 

With their eerily-prescient themes, Kahn + Selesnick series have often predated world events, such as the financial crisis of 2008 which corresponded to the complications of devalued currency in the artists’ timely series “Eisbergfriestadt,”as well as the early environmental flood warnings of the series “Dreams of a Drowning World.” With the exhibited series, “Madame Lulu’s Book of Fate,” much of which was created in 2019, the duo’s visionary powers are revived as the artists inadvertently land on the current topical nightmare that is the corona virus signified by the pastel and conte crayon augury drawing Pangolin Bonaparte. The drawing pairs the notion of the French Emperor with the long-snouted, scaled mammal called the pangolin, believed to be the possible zoonotic bearer of the intractable contagion to humans. Finely rendered in a circular portrait, the strange, delicately realized blue-toned creature wraps around the neck of the figure to rest on top of his head. Adorable in its appearance, yet unnervingly positioned with its tail wound around the figure’s neck and on the lookout, the pangolin reflects a kind of forewarning to humankind of Nature’s advantage in the current epidemiological catastrophe. The work of Kahn + Selesnick may exemplify transmutation and transcendence of sorts, but truth in their world might also aptly be what emanates from the megaphone between the buttocks of the garter-clad, masked fool. Wheeling forth next to death and a Pierrot clown on a makeshift conveyance, the contrived spectacle is topped by the bannered declaration of ABSURDITE, FUTILITE, CAPTIVITE – the state of their world, as the artists envision it. As in select previous series including “City of Salt,” “Scotlandfuturebog” and the all-embracing series “Truppe Fledermaus and the Carnival at the End of the World,” Kahn + Selesnick adroitly layer their preposterous theatrically created worlds with both fantasy and foresighted truths alike. 

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick each have a BFA from Washington University, St. Louis and have been working together as a team since the early 1980s. Their recognitions include numerous grants and awards such as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Green Leaf Award from the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo Norway, a NASA commission for “Mars,” and Provincetown Arts Council Grant, among others. Kahn + Selesnick have been part of artist residencies at Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, the Djerassi Artist Program, Woodside, California, and Toni Morrison’s Atelier Program at Princeton University, New Jersey. Their work has been shown in more than eighty solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Belgium and in group exhibitions in China, France, Germany, Monaco, and Norway. Among the exhibiting museums are: the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography and Field Museum, Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Lübeck, Germany, and Cape Cod Museum of Art. Their work can be found in the collections of Denver Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Boston Public Library, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fogg Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as well as in corporate collections including Estee Lauder, Microsoft, and Time Magazine. 

Artists Statement:

Madame Lulu’s Book of Fate When you look through the porthole of your berth aboard the ship, what do you see? The raging ocean? A lone iceberg? The world as it once was, now receding into the distance? Likewise, when you peer through your telescope at the distant boat from the lonely shoreline, what do you see? An approaching storm? A drowning man? The future, drifting forever out of reach? The Truppe Fledermaus invite you to look through the portal where you shall find scenes of men and women trying to parse that which is to come, speak with those departed, or just finding their pleasure amid the florid decay of a world in decline. For in a world where personal and societal mythologies supersede facts, where the promise of virtual realities threaten to supersede the real thing, what better way to approach an uncertain future than through the arcane methods of augury and clairvoyance—after all, is not prophecy the original fake news? 

Our latest project “Madame Lulu’s Book of Fate” continues the adventures of the Truppe Fledermaus, a cabaret troupe of anxious mummers and would-be mystics who catalogue their absurdist attempts to augur a future that seems increasingly in peril due to environmental pressures and global turmoil. In this body of work, we also examine the notion of the carnivalesque—traditionally the carnival was a time when the normal order of society was upended and reversed, so that at least for a day the fool might become king, the sinner a priest, men and women might cross dress, and sacred ceremonies and normal mores are burlesqued and spoofed. During such brief times of anarchy, societal pressures were relieved by revealing their somewhat absurd and arbitrary natures. Costumes and masks were traditionally worn so that all people might have the same social status during the duration of the festival. The Truppe ask you to consider: is it the carnival that is upside-down, or perhaps the real world that it purports to burlesque?