In an interview with Monopol,Kiev Biennale curator David Elliott asserts he has not experienced corruption or interference while working in politically unstable Ukraine.
Opera News, one of the leading classical music magazines in the country, said it would stop reviewing the Metropolitan Opera, resulting from the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative critiques.
Since her 2006 debut at Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Mickalene Thomas has become an artist as much known for her preoccupation with nineteenth-century French painters as for her love of color, texture, black women, and rhinestones. Although her canny use of the artificial gem is perhaps the most frequently commented-upon aspect of her work, Thomas’s art also offers a complex and layered examination of the history of visual representation of the black female body by both white and black artists. Thomas’s work puts a twist on compositional traditions and techniques from French Modernists and Orientalist painters, particularly that of the odalisque. She populates scenes in which white women were once central figures with black women who appear to have stepped out of a ’70s blaxsploitation film.1 By referencing problematic source material from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Thomas underscores the difficulty in challenging racial and gender stereotypes, particularly in regard to black female sexuality.
For Origin of the Universe, her first major museum survey, Thomas introduces a new suite of paintings that suggests a shift in focus from the black female figure to the environments and landscapes they occupy. More Dwell or Architectural Digest than vintage Ebony or Jet in their styling, these (mostly) interior spaces do not appear to be lived in and lack the sensual and rich animal, floral, and geometric prints with which Thomas usually fills her paintings. The landscapes, by contrast, are dreamier. Although they are painted in Thomas’s signature collage-like style—with swaths of paint and rhinestone-embellished fragments—there is no other clear connection between the landscapes and the other works on view.
Four of the remaining paintings are bust portraits of two women, Din and Qusuquzah, one of whom is also the subject of the exhibition’s lone photograph, Qusuquzah Standing Sideways (2012). The portraits of Din and Qusuquzah show a tremendous amount of restraint on the artist’s part. The women’s clothing and the floral backdrop are much more muted in tone than Thomas’s usual style; rather than using rhinestones to create depth and intensity throughout, the paintings accent the women’s makeup and jewelry. Although these paintings lack the dimensionality found in similar earlier portraits such as Portrait of a Lovely Six Foota #2 (2007), they are no less absorbing, especially in the sense that the prim portraits of Din and Qusuquzah are a striking
Mickalene Thomas. Interior: Blue Couch with Green Owl, 2012; rhinestones, acrylic oil, and enamel on wood panel; 108 x 84 x 2 in. Collection of Michael Hoeh, New York. Courtesy of the Artist, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, and Susanne Vieltmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo: Christopher Burke Studio.
Mickalene Thomas. Origin of the Universe 1, 2012; rhinestones, acrylic oil, and enamel on wood panel; 60 x 48 in. Collection of the Hudgins Family, New York. Courtesy of the Artist, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, and Susanne Vieltmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo: Christopher Burke Studio.
contrast to Origin of the Universe 1 and Origin of the Universe 2 (both 2012), Thomas’s interpretations of Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Origine du monde (1866).
Origin 1 features the torso of a dark-skinned woman with dark-brown rhinestones for pubic hair, whereas Origin 2 depicts a white woman with brunette pubic hair; in both the figures are framed similarly to Courbet’s model. Although Thomas uses rhinestones in her usual fashion here, both of her subjects’ inner labia and clitorises lack the fleshy pink anatomical realism that made Courbet’s original so scandalous at the time, though the anatomy is more pronounced and natural-looking in Origin 2. What Thomas’s side-by-side reinterpretations emphasize are the ways in which scientific discourse has historically fetishized black female genitalia, resulting in such truly obscene acts as the preservation and one-hundred-and-sixty-year display of the genitals of Saartjie Baartman (before 1790–1815), better known as the Hottentot Venus.2 Yet, at the same time, through these multiple versions of Courbet’s painting, Thomas is not afraid to point out her fixation on her own sex, its uses for pleasure, and most importantly her desire to share it with the public, an especially taboo act for an African-American artist.
The same can be said for Thomas’s most ambitious and perhaps most successful painting in the show, Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires (2012). Based on and named after Courbet’s 1866 painting Le Sommeil, Sleep depicts two women lying in an ambiguously post-coital embrace in a hybrid interior landscape that is unrecognizable as any specific location. Although one cannot with certainty claim that the two women are lesbians, the painting’s homoerotic overtones evoke some of Thomas’s earlier works, particularly her 2007 paintings of wrestling and brawling women.
Although the work in Origin of the Universe is beautiful and well executed, it is not Thomas’s strongest showing. The relationship between the portraits of fantastical landscapes, hyper-stylized rooms, and the portraits of women is unclear, though she makes an attempt to bring them all together in the large and lush Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires. Regardless, Thomas’s deliberate but finely crafted engagement with the Modernist modes of painting, particularly in Sleep, proves that she’s well aware of the conceptual ramifications of not only her subject matter but also the forms she uses to explore it. Her reinterpretation of Courbet and ongoing appropriation of his contemporaries, who either relegated black women to the side of their white mistresses or erased them altogether from their canvases, generates questions about the privilege of looking. In painting subjects that look back at those who behold them—in some cases with obvious desire—Thomas challenges the assumption that racial and sexual objectification negates personal agency. Her women are bad mama jamas and they ask viewers to recognize them as such without reservation or guilt.3 Thomas suggests that this “reckless eyeballing” is necessary to confront the contradictions seemingly inherent to sexual representations of the black female nude.4
1. Ironically, for a genre that largely depicts its white odalisques being waited on by dark-skinned maids, the term itself comes from odalik, the Turkish term for a female slave or chambermaid.
4. Coined during the Jim Crow era (1876–1965), reckless eyeballing was the act of black men returning the gaze of a white person. Legally prohibited and a punishable offence, the penalties ranged from imprisonment to execution, especially if the “victim” was a white female. The most notorious case of reckless eyeballing is that of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy who was tortured and murdered for allegedly recklessly eyeballing Carol Bryant in 1955.
When I attended the opening of Golden Journey, the exhibition by the Chinese artist Lin Yilin currently on view at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), I did not expect to see graffiti covering the walls of the Walter and McBean Galleries. Created by students at SFAI, the graffiti is a visual echo chamber of the urban soundtrack that accompanies the large-scale video projections of Lin’s San Francisco–based performances, developed during a 2011 residency at the Kadist Art Foundation and documented by photographs and sculptural installations.
The exhibition’s title references Lin’s exploratory relationship to San Francisco, known in Chinese as “Golden City.” The six performance works feature the artist traversing major landmarks—the Golden Gate Bridge, the hairpin turns of Lombard Street, and Powell Street from Chinatown to Market Street—by rolling, slowly. His limbs slack, Lin allows even his head to roll along the ground, as if trying to imprint all parts of himself onto the city’s streets and vice versa. A blockade of collaborators shuffles silently in front of the rolling Lin, pacing his slow turnover and announcing his movement as a quiet public spectacle. Like the hull of an arctic tanker, they carve space out of pedestrian traffic for Lin’s processional intervention. Sited in a major, fast-paced city, the whole thing is so spectacularly unremarkable, so slow and deliberate, that it becomes a kind of radical action. The African-American performance artist William Pope.L, whose politically inflected “crawls” resonate strongly with Lin’s prostrate navigations, spoke of the body disrupting the order of things as a form of physical discourse: “Bottom line: artists don’t make art, they make conversations. They make things happen. They change the world.”1
In Lin’s previous work, such conversations have typically addressed his native Guangzhou, China. As a cofounder of the Guangzhou-based artist collaborative Big-Tail-Elephant Group in 1990, Lin addressed the rapid urbanization of this southern Chinese city and its transformation into a megacity. In his 1995 work, Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road,the artist appropriated materials from a major skyscraper construction site to build his own cinderblock wall that he gradually moved, block by block, across a busy thoroughfare.
The cinderblock wall is a popular motif in Lin’s oeuvre, and one such wall divides the main space of the cavernous gallery at SFAI. The wall appears to have trapped the body of a papier-mâché ceremonial Chinese lion, whose head rests on the ground next to a drum. To present a cultural icon as if it were a prized kill caught in the concrete teeth of capitalist development is a biting criticism on its own; that the lion’s body is made of dollar bills attests to the commodified, desacralized status of this icon. Lin has addressed the
Lin Yillin. Golden Hill, 2011 (still); single-channel video; 36.05 min. Courtesy of the Artist and Walter and McBean Galleries.
Lin Yillin. Golden Lion, 2012; installation view, Golden Journey, 2012. Courtesy of the Artist and Walter and McBean Galleries.
defanging of cultural symbols in earlier work: I am on the Right (1997) featured the artist on all fours on a sculptural pedestal opposite a small family of stone lions, similar to those that once adorned the gates of imperial residences and that now flank office buildings and banks in China. While Lin’s work in China sharply criticizes the way in which the shift from a communist to capitalist economy forces cultural commodification, the dialogues surrounding his San Francisco–based works are more ambiguous.
In the performance Golden Lion, Lin wears a lion-dance costume backward, allowing its head to drag on the ground behind him while he strolls unremarkably through Chinatown. But this simple gesture transforms a normally communal spectacle into an ordinary, solitary movement while Lin’s rolling performances transform a simple, ordinary movement into spectacle. The conversation at hand in the latter addresses the physics of a body’s movement in a foreign space. Upon visiting San Francisco for the first time, Lin oriented himself through topographical exploration, seeking adaptation through basic movements. He concluded that the simple rotation of his body was a test of both his physical limits and his endurance of the city’s surfaces.
Along with a phenomenological dimension, Lin’s interventions also bring cultural awareness to the realm of pedestrianism. Think of the artist’s roll down Powell Street in Golden Hill (2011), the largest video projection in the exhibition. What is it like to feel the streetcar rumblings through one’s body rather than to hear or see it? What is it like, as a contemporary Chinese artist, to roll through Chinatown—where the first American flag was erected in San Francisco, this city of initial Chinese immigration to the United States—and to accumulate the downhill wear of traveling to Market Street, home to the spectacular annual Chinese New Year parade, where that cultural legacy survives nearly two centuries later?
Golden Journey is at once a travel narrative and a series of disruptions in the fabric of everyday life. Lin’s performance interventions and the graffiti that accompanies them are forms of social discourse and, as such, are a kind of last gasp for a critical aesthetics. In his 1978 text, The Faith of Graffiti, Norman Mailer writes: “The last reference of painting or sculpture is the wall on which something can be hung, or the floor on which a piece can sit. That must now disappear. The art-piece enters the artist: sometimes the work can only be experienced within his psyche.”2 While contemporary Chinese artists are often expected to unveil something of China’s exotic modernization process through their work, this is not always their focus or intent. It is refreshing, then, that the work in Golden Journey says more about San Francisco, transmitted through the artist’s body, than about Chinese modernization. Rather, Lin seeks to carve out space in his audience’s memory by turning the performances into time-based landmarks of the physical landmarks that we in our pedestrian lives often blindly walk by.
Lin Yilin: Golden Journey is on view at Walter and McBean Galleries, at the San Francisco Art Institute, through July 28, 2012.
________ NOTES:
1. Lowery Stokes Sims, “William Pope.L: An Interview,” in William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, ed. Mark H. C. Bessire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 64–65.
2. Norman Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti (New York: Praeger, 1974), no pagination.
Thumbnail: Libby Black. Crap, 2012; graphite on paper; 9.5 x 10.5 in. Courtesy Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco.
Libby Black’s exhibition of new works at Marx & Zavattero, titled Nothing Lasts Forever, includes still-life drawings, paintings, and paint-and-paper sculptures, cataloging both quotidian objects and media touchstones significant to her identity “as a daughter, a lesbian, an artist, a mother, a dreamer, a fan, a lover, etc.”1 By assimilating a wide range of subjects with a cohesive visual style, Black creates a highly complex visual autobiography.
That’s not to say that she has abandoned the glossy subject matter of earlier works, such as a paper sculpture of a Mercedes, the Kate Spade store she replicated for the exhibition Bay Area Now 4, or her many drawings of luxury magazine advertisements. Her meticulous paper sculptures of expensive items offer an ambivalent critique of their financial and metaphorical value. Goyard Bag with Produce (2012), a sculpture of a luxury tote bag laden with organic asparagus and artisanal olive oil, and a series of floral still-life paintings—including Untitled Bouquet, Purple Tulips, and Gone Again (all 2012)—hint at a style-conscious, well-heeled existence. Black’s cool, detached paint handling, applied with broad, even strokes, calls to mind the superficial, nearly abstract appreciation of the good life in David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings from the late 1960s.
While these works appraise the surfaces of the items in Black's life, the partially dressed women in the graphite picture-within-a-picture in Sisters (2012) peer out from the drawing as if coolly appraising the work’s viewers. Though Black is not completely invested in glamorizing her subjects, her stylized rendering of them into flattened and simplified shapes recall the Deco-era portraits of aristocrats, movie stars, and oligarchsby Tamara de Lempicka. Like Black, de Lempicka made glamorous images that conveyed wealth and status. Although de Lempicka glorified expensive things—
Libby Black. Purple Tulips, 2012; oil on canvas; 36 x 24 in. Courtesy Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco.
Libby Black. Goyard Bag with Produce, 2012; paper, acrylic, and hot glue; 25 x 22 x 12 in. Courtesy Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco.
depicting herself driving a glowing green, then-new Bugatti in Autoportait (1925)—Black's attitude is more ambivalent. Whereas de Lempicka used flatness to render her subjects with smooth perfection, the flattened shapes in Black’s work, such as the flowers in Sisters or the bananas in Goyard, suggest an emptiness or artificiality.
Diametrically counter to the tranquil, unworried imagery of the floral still lifes in the show is a set of intimately sized drawings arranged in a cluster, based on photographic images depicting moments of catastrophe, protest, or transition: the first openly gay tennis star, Martina Navratilova, celebrating a victory on the court; the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster; the federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas; and a tightly cropped shot of a baby crowning in a mother’s birth canal, as if responding to Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) with an even more intense depiction of a disembodied vagina. Queersare Dears (2012) and Crap (2012), two other drawings in the series, both show gay-rights protests in which people are actively demonstrating against their marginalization by an oppressive cultural ideology. Only images of Axl Rose and Roseanne Barr seem out of place in the grouping. Within the context of the rest of the exhibit's genteel subject matter, perhaps these two images serve as personal symbols, taken from pop culture, to connote a rebellion against nominally refined aesthetic sensibilities. What’s more, Black’s careful attention to the faces and signage of the demonstrators indicates her sympathy and support for their cause. Given that the images and objects that she selects to represent her life connote financial comfort, leisure, and detachment, the images in this small grouping—and of the protests in particular—offer a surprising contrast, with their focus on turmoil and American culture. Black also defines herself and her place in this country beyond her personal style, tastes, or means as a consumer.
In an increasingly polarized political climate, when our national reliance on a market economy has been tested again and again to the point of unrest, even the basic capitalist assumption that material wealth directly equates to individual happiness is too simplistic. Black’s work has always addressed the thin veneer of social status and desire that propels consumer culture. With this exhibition, she reveals the personal well of complex emotion beneath her critical gaze. Wealth and its accoutrements can’t solve thorny political problems and aren’t the same thing as love and acceptance, even if they're marketed as perfect substitutions. As Black is a maker of objects likely to be collected and appreciated for their aesthetic properties, her ultimately critical stance is as potentially radical as its packaging is familiarly seductive.
Nothing Lasts Forever is on view at Marx & Zavattero, in San Francisco, through May 26, 2012.
Daniel Clowes is the John le Carré of the graphic novel, the poet-warrior of the disillusioned children of hippy parents, whose belated discovery that their lives were not quite as special as they were supposed to be led to deep and irresolvable psychic scars. Like the novelist le Carré’s spymaster George Smiley, Clowes also runs a kind of circus where the self-deceptions of those who would diagnose the world around them become exploitable tragic flaws to be manipulated by the master diagnostician. In other words, Clowes is our unique misanthrope, and his anthems of isolated frustration are damned funny, as proven by the Oakland Museum of California’s recent exhibition of close to a quarter century’s production of his brilliantly caustic work. The exhibition was organized by Susan Miller and René de Guzman and accompanies the release of a book about Clowes’s work, edited by Alvin Buenaventura.
Parsing the history of the comic narrative into three phases brings Clowes’s work into a truly unique focus. The first of these phases is the superhero phase, which roughly corresponds to the age of American triumphalism in the Second World War and early Cold War guises. While millions of neglected teenagers followed the antics of leotard-clad alter egos, they could fantasize that they would someday be powerful enough to not have to clean up their rooms. And the superpowers of their favored protagonists did say something obliquely relevant about the way that various technological innovations were reshaping the world in which they would soon live.
The second phase was the underground comics phase so brilliantly exemplified by R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, and George Kuchar. In this phase, the target audience was the legion of rambunctious college students who had arrived in the cities from the suburbs, away from home but not quite on their own. Their challenge was to find a place in a quickly changing world that only made absurd sense. Insofar as comics were concerned, the key point is that the social world was no longer pictured as something evil, over which the protagonist might heroically triumph, but was instead a place populated by flamboyant characters that cultivated their idiosyncratic absurdities while refusing gainful employment, as might be
Cover of Wilson, 2010. Courtesy of the Artist and the Oakland Museum of California.
Daniel Clowes. Eightball 18, 1996; gouache on white board; 22.5 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Oakland Museum of California.
witnessed by Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead or Crumb’s Mister Natural. Such characters were thoroughly suffused with the generational optimism of sexually active baby boomers, who were able to bring an immoral war to an end simply by throwing a giant, collective tantrum that most often took the form of unlistenable music. But then came punk, which threw an even louder tantrum, albeit one that was much less efficacious in relation to a new and more draconian political front, with which Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher aggressively rescripted the relation between private and public wealth. Clowes’s predominately white post-punk protagonists live in the placeless, vaguely nightmarish every-world that resulted from that rescripting. Despite their deep commitment to fits of misguided effort followed by sociopathic inertia, they work very hard at negotiating the omnipresent disappointments that seem to lurk at every turn of their so-called lives, and each in his or her own way is a connoisseur of the resignation and absurdity that comes part and parcel with that task.
Take the über-snarky Enid, from Clowes’s mid-1990s series, Ghost World. For her, identity is a kind of prison that threatens to rob her of the right to be ambivalent about everything, and her relationship with her partner in thought crime, Rebecca, plays out as a prolonged inversion of the superhero narrative. Such characters, based on a lack of character, is where Clowes truly excels, and one can see how their petty ruses and silly self-deceptions led to Clowes’s nomination, with Terry Zwigoff, for a Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award for the 2001 film version of Ghost World. An earlier work, the strip from 1991 titled Art School Confidential, was the basis for another Zwigoff-directed film released in 2005. As a long-time teacher working in an art school setting, I can say that seeing the original drawing for this comic was an experience akin to viewing the Mask of Agamemnon, and all I could do was fall to my knees to weep warm tears of appreciation.
One of the treats of this exhibition is the section that contains the actual drawings from which the zines and graphic novels are made, and these reveal something quite intimate about Clowes’s brilliantly unpredictable process of story formulation. We might note a blue registration line peeking from behind a few panels, and we also can see that Clowes occasionally makes use of a collage technique. Nonetheless, the drawings are always crisp and seldom brittle, and he organizes the visual information in each of his panels in such a way to include complex information without succumbing to visual clutter. This is particularly evident in the drawings for his most recent character, the adorably standoffish Wilson (2010), who seems like an intellectually gifted cousin of Mr. Wilson, of Dennis the Menace fame. Whereas most of Clowes’s characters tend to embarrass themselves while trying and failing to be hipsters, Wilson refuses such folly and broaches no nonsense, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He is interesting and morbidly funny precisely because he doesn’t suffer his own foolishness either, even as his circumstances give him no real choice in the matter.
Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes is on view at the Oakland Museum of California through August 12, 2012.
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (1895–1983) was a courageous and intellectually compulsive individual whose life coincided with revolutions in physics, aesthetics, industry, and technologies. He was a visionary in the truest sense, developing a particularly visual form of thinking about the metabolic and metaphysical aspects of our future. His inventive, if hyperbolic, utopian mind likened the institutional boundaries of specialized and autonomous knowledge to enslavement.1 The boundlessness of Fuller’s career, geared towards developing a higher standard of living for all, resulted in a profusion of design-science collaborations and inventions—most notably the geodesic dome—as well as an enormous and dizzying archive now housed at Stanford University, which sustains the indeterminate process of Fuller-style explorations from generation to generation.2
The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area, currently on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), focuses on the legacy of Fuller’s comprehensive global thinking as it has percolated locally in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are innumerable possibilities for curating exhibitions from Fuller’s oeuvre. Curator Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher has assembled an elegant combination of commemorative media reaching as far back as Fuller’s 1936 telegram to artist Isamu Noguchi—explaining his ideas for a Floating Tetrahedral City in the San Francisco Bay—and as far forward as to include contemporary projects inspired by Fuller, one of which was commissioned especially for this show.
Alongside the telegram, the Whole Earth Catalog exudes a mysterious hippie charm. The Menlo Park–based publication, inspired by and dedicated to Fuller, once buttressed the countercultural commune lifestyle of the late 1960s and ’70s. It is the historic precedent to today’s technocultural magazine Wired. The inclusion of the catalog in the exhibit highlights a particular strain of Fuller’s advocacy for liberatory technologies and his interest in cybernetic systems, propagated posthumously by Stewart Brand, John Brockman, and other Bay Area figures in the 1980s and ’90s. Fuller’s legacy can be seen in Brand’s ongoing seminar series, founded in 2003 for the Long Now Foundation, which integrates art, design, and culture into wholistic thinking about the future. The series redresses a critique of Brand’s techno-capitalist “countercultural” approach, whose increasingly mainstream work manifested a computer science–dependent utopia that sidelined social responsibility.3
On the walls surrounding this display of evocative media objects, SFMOMA presents several large-format visualizations, including the museum’s recently acquired portfolio of screen prints by Fuller, Inventions: Twelve Around One (1981). The portfolio, produced in collaboration with Chuck Byrne, documents thirteen patented design projects spanning Fuller’s career. The
prints are exquisitely detailed; using white ink, Fuller inscribed his sophisticated mode of design thinking on top of grayscale photographs ranging from illustrative landscape phenomena to portraits of his patented products. These white ink diagrams and notations, much like the titles of each print in the series, are difficult to decipher. However, stepping back from the prints, one can appreciate the masterful visualization of a layered temporal perspective. Fuller breaks with the illusion of absolute representative photography, instead using visual media to think about the past, present, and dynamic variations of the future.
The second gallery continues to explore the legacy of Fuller in contemporary culture, presenting the work of an entourage of artists, designers, and architects whose prototypes accommodate collective creativity and social change. Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott’s Jellyfish House (2005–2006) is an alluring architectural prototype modeled with white nylon that resonates with Fuller’s Inventions portfolio. This San Francisco–based architecture duo imagines the Jellyfish House as a living, sensory-rich environment, like a distributed nervous system in which the building itself can detect sensory information about its surroundings and adapt accordingly. The design was specifically proposed for Treasure Island, a decommissioned wetland military site in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. The prototype is accompanied by a digital animation that serves as a virtual tour of the building’s interior as it responds to a hypothetical Bay Area weather system.
Within earshot of the Jellyfish House is a small dark sidebar-like gallery containing a multichannel video projected onto a wall sculpture inspired by Fuller’s iconic Dymaxion Air Ocean World Map, the first edition of which was published in Life magazine in March 1943. Built by tech firm Obscura Digital, the sculpture is visually enticing for its robust angular construction and tension cables suspended from various points in the small room. SFMOMA commissioned artist Sam Green to create a video that documents Fuller in the Bay Area; the lucid work consists of twelve chapters culled from the mountain of archival footage that Fuller preserved in his personal archive, the Dymaxion Chronofile, as well as interviews with local Fuller scholars such as Fred Turner of Stanford University.
Utopian Impulse revises countercultural thinking in the Bay Area, defying stereotypes of West Coast utopias as sites of chaotic, passive, or psychedelic subversion. Rather than seeking to overthrow the whole socioeconomic system, many West Coast utopians have and continue to propose innovative ideas for structural improvement. Of the prototypes included in this exhibition, some have never been implemented at full scale, and some failed to achieve commercial success. For example, the challenge of cladding the edge of each triangular element in Fuller’s geodesic domes in order to prevent leakage proved impractical for large-scale production, even as the dome—like the yurt—endures as an eccentric option for small-scale single family homes. However, as Fletcher notes, this assessment of success or failure misses the point of the exhibition.4Utopian Impulse fosters the courage and creativity of thinkers who actively partake in the indeterminate process of building a better future.
1. R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 30.
2. For example, Sir Harry Kroto and the team who were inspired by Fuller’s geodesic domes and discovered the “architectural” structure of the new carbon molecule, Buckminster Fullerine (C60), to be a dodecahedron. Martin Kemp, Seen – Unseen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8.
3. Lee Worden, “Counterculture, Cyberculture, and the Third Culture: Reinventing Civilization, Then and Now” in West of Eden: Communies and Utopia in Northern California (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 199-221.
4. Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher in “SFMOMA Looks at Buckminster Fuller’s Legacy in the Bay Area: Architecture and Design Exhibition Links Fuller’s Radical Idealism to Local Innovators Inspired by His Visionary Thinking,” exhibition press release, November 21, 2011.
Thumbnail: Rigo 23. Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program, 2009-12; installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Tomás. Photo: Scott Groller.
The Portuguese artist Ricardo Gouveia, or Rigo 23, might be best known for his series of larger-than-life, one-way-sign-inspired murals, painted on buildings across San Francisco, where the artist has lived since the 1980s. For the better part of the last decade, however, Rigo 23 has produced a series of projects with underserved and underrepresented communities. The latest of these, Programa Espacial Autónomo InterGalactico (Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program), has just docked at REDCAT, CalArt’s theater and gallery space in downtown Los Angeles.
The culmination of more than three years of coordination and labor by Rigo 23 and artisans from Chiapas, Mexico, as well as members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Programa Espacial represents a convergence of multiple worlds.1 When Rigo 23 met with the members of the Good Government Junta of Morelia, Chiapas, to propose a collaborative art project between himself and artists from the region, he asked, “What would happen if they got an invitation to attend an intergalactic meeting somewhere other than the Milky Way; how would they travel?”2 The junta members accepted this proposal but made it clear that the project was not a priority and would only be accomplished if he won the support of a local artist.
BecausePrograma Espacial is a collaborative project between an artist and various indigenous communities, and because those communities are under the jurisdiction of the EZLN, the exhibit brings up questions of commodification and appropriation, but these questions seem to have been of lesser interest to Rigo 23 than the question of positionality. The spiraling path a viewer takes through the exhibit evokes (within the limits of California’s fire code) the curve of a snail’s shell, creating interplay between a viewer’s sense of being sympathetically “inside” the EZLN looking out, or an outsider looking in.3
Upon entering the gallery, visitors find themselves at the first of many thresholds, facing a long, wooden fence covered by a mural depicting three masked Zapatista figures: one male, one female, and one child. The figures stride across the Earth, machetes in one hand and torches in the other. They occupy the center of the composition, next to a list of EZLN demands. To each side of this trio extends the galaxy, full of stars and other celestial bodies like the moon and the sun, all wearing their own black balaclavas, or pasamontañas.4
Rigo 23. Autonomous InterGalactic Planetarium, 2009-12; installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Pedro Pica Piedra, Beto, Santiago Marcial, Monserrat Blanco, Gabriela, Marcos Sanchez, Domingo Santiz Ruiz, Mia Rollow, Paulina, Adrian Quiroz, Manuel Hidalgo, Ivan Pablo Soria, Pablo Milan, Miguel Hidalgo, Caleb Duarte, Jacobo Lagos, Erwin, Salvador. Photo: Scott Groller.
________ NOTES:
1. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation first rose to prominence in 1994, after the organization seized various cities, towns, and estates in the Mexican state of Chiapas by force. The initial goal was to protest the North American Free Trade Agreement and to regain control of the region’s land for its various indigenous communities. The EZLN considers itself to be fighting a “War Against Oblivion,” and the realization of a world in which many worlds can fit is a key goal in that war. See John Ross, The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles 1994-2000 (Common Courage Press, 2002).
Over the past decade especially, the Mexican government has taken a hands-off approach with the Zapatista Army, in essence ceding it control of five zones, or caracoles, in Chiapas although no formal transfer of power has been declared. Anyone can visit Chiapas, but access to the caracoles depends on how well a visitor makes their case for entrance. Each caracol is governed by a Board of Good Government (or junta), the members of which are chosen by consensus; these members hear visitors’ cases. Note: caracol is Spanish for snail.
Rigo 23. Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program, 2009-12; installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Amos Gregory and Melissa Adams. Photo: Scott Groller.
On either side of the mural are openings. The opening on the right leads to the back of the gallery space, to a room full of artifacts accumulated by Rigo 23 during his stay in Chiapas. These include colorful, acrylic paintings of Zapatista figures accompanied by phrases like “Mas de 500 años en resistencia !ya basta¡” and “Nunca mas la humillacion y el desprecio,” dark woven fabrics embroidered with constellations, and individually acquired fabric squares sewn into quilts, or telas.5 Much of the imagery and iconography in these objects—masked Zapatistas holding machetes, torches, and even video cameras, often fighting a dragon that represents organizations like the WTO and NAFTA, surrounded by depictions of nature, as well as transmission satellites—is taken up throughout the rest of the exhibit.
The other entrance opens to a long, narrow hallway, the sides of which have been cobbled together out of brightly painted wood planks and doors, giving the appearance of an alleyway in Chiapas. This interplay between inside and outside continues along the wall to the right, which is punctured by rectangular peepholes, their shape echoing the eyeholes of a pasamontaña, that look into the center of the exhibit. To peer through them is to effectively see through the eyes of the EZLN. Other peepholes along the way look onto videos that show the artisans who worked on the project, as well as footage of an EZLN protest in San Cristobal de las Casas, the capital of Chiapas.
At the exhibit’s center hangs a model of a large, wooden spaceship, shaped like an ear of corn, full of actual soil and suspended from the ceiling to give the appearance of flying horizontally through space.6 The husk, or skin of the ship, is made of long, thin strips of wood, and tens of woven baskets meant to represent individual kernels erupt from its back, each carrying a picture of a masked Zapatista. Sculptures of a bandana-wearing moon, a sequined-balaclava-wearing sun, and a transmission satellite that uses video footage of actual Zapatista eyes looking through their masks, all hang at various points in the room and give the impression of a strange, science-fiction movie set.
On the ship’s prow sit three carved, wooden snails with human faces, wearing pasamontañas, and two tiny Zapatista dolls man the helm. Small, rectangular peepholes (of the same shape as those in the passageways) provide glimpses of miniature dioramas inside the ship, including a bedroom, a classroom, and a basketball court. At this point the viewer experiences a shift in position yet again, from being at the exhibit’s center, to peering into yet another interior space from the outside.
Programa Espacial is about thresholds, about drawing attention to those moments when inside meets outside. Such experiences stand as counterparts to the worlds-within-worlds cosmology reflected in the exhibit’s layout and content. Both are crucial tenets of the Zapatista’s worldview, which Rigo 23’s collaborative project articulates in good faith without coming off as opportunistic or exploitative. This fact itself is rare enough to make it worth the visit.
Programa Espacial Autónomo InterGalactico is on view at REDCAT, in Los Angeles, though June 17.
________ NOTES (cont.):
2. Rigo 23 found the metaphor of Earth as a ship, or spaceship, in Zapatista writings, which interweave Mayan cosmology and place quite a bit of importance on transmission devices (spaceships, shells, satellites, and video cameras, for example).
3. As a place where “inside meets outside,” the snail shell is a highly potent symbol for the EZLN, as well as an icon for speech.
4. Members of the EZLN wear pasamontañas over their faces, with a wide, rectangular opening for the eyes, in order to hide individual identities and emphasize one common identity: the exploited, indigenous underclass whose way of life they feel is in danger.
5. “More than 500 years of resistance is enough!” and “No more humiliation or contempt,” respectively.
6. Corn is still the most important nutrient for the indigenous Mayan communities that make up the EZLN. The image of the corn ship appears in works by local artists.
On the morning I was leaving Mexico City, I saw the mountains for the first time. In the distance, I could just make out Popocatépetl between the billboards as my taxi rushed me to the airport. Popocatépetl is the world’s youngest volcano, which first erupted in the 1940s, and I could see a plume of ash issuing from its heights. I could not help but think of the rumbling beneath the earth as a metaphor for Mexico City’s rapidly expanding art world. The city is as populous as New York and as wide as Los Angeles, though there are probably not as many galleries there as there are in San Francisco. But it is on the rise. Long a place where the centralized government invested heavily in the arts, Mexico City has a new generation of foundations and private enterprises that has led to a groundswell in its art market and in the ambitions of the artists who reside in the city. During a recent visit to Zona Maco, the city’s annual art fair, the expansion of possibilities in the visual arts was palpable.
There is no way of getting around the fact that art fairs are fundamentally trade shows for high-end merchandise, but the advantage of visiting Mexico City during the fair is that all the local institutions and galleries show off, timing their openings and projects to capture everyone’s attention. Thanks to this confluence, I experienced a host of contemporary projects, though only a fraction of what was on offer. One can only do so much in four days.
More than a hundred booths were crammed cheek by jowl into a large exhibition hall on the edge of Mexico City, in the Centro Banamex. The fair was divided into four sections. The main exhibition included fifty-seven booths, representing fifteen galleries from Mexico and fourteen other countries. This cosmopolitan lot did not disappoint. There was a lot of strong work from locals and foreigners and while there were some surprises, there was also much that could be seen at any art fair. As one might expect, the focus was on Latin America, and some of my favorite discoveries were the cut-paper drawing by Miguel Ángel Rios at Gallery Luis Adelantado (Valencia, Spain) and the dramatic crumpled, hand-made reproduction of Diego Rivera’s Man, Controller of the Universe (1934) by Javier Arce at Gallery T20 (Murcia, Spain). There was also the New Propositions section, with younger galleries from all over, but most interesting for me were the galleries from other cities in Mexico, such as La Estación from Chihuahua. This space provided some compelling surprises, including artists who mixed regional craft traditions with conceptual art vernacular, such as Ariàn Dylan’s woven consumer goods.
The Zona Maco Sur section, curated by Patrick Charpenel, was for me the most exciting aspect. Like other art fairs, Zona Maco turned over some of its space to the presentation of single-artist, mini gallery exhibitions, and I was delighted to find a captivating project by Shilpa Gupta presented by Yvon Lambert of Paris. Two local galleries, Gaga Arte Contemporáneo and Galeria d’Arte Moderna, also offered strong presentations of
Andando hacia adelante, contando hacia atrás: Palestra Europa del Este, 2012; installation view, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo. Courtesy of Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City.
Fernando Palma Rodríguez. Tocihuapapalutzin (Our lady butterfly), 2012; microcontrollers, wood, aluminum; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Gaga Fine Arts. Photo: Isaac Contreras.
the artists Fernando Palma Rodríguez and Diégo Perez, respectively. Finally, I was won over by a video from the Brazilian artist Eugenia Calvo, featuring a Dutch porcelain wonderland suffering an attack from mashed potatoes.
The city at large has been inundated with new museums in the past ten years, including the Museo Soumaya and, specifically for contemporary art, the Colección Jumex and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC). I visited the latter and experienced a series of engaging and expertly curated group and individual exhibitions. The exhibitions, such as Andando hacia adelante, contando hacia atrás: Palestra Europa del Este (Moving forward, counting backwards: Eastern Europe Palestra) and Extranjerías (Foreigners) were good enough to put the New Museum on alert. Also, long-standing exhibition spaces, such as the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the Colegio de San Ildefonso, have turned to presenting more contemporary art in recent years. Quodlibet, a small investigative project by Pablo Helguera, exposed some of the most fantastic aspects of the history of Bellas Artes and added a recitation of his own to this history. La lengua de Ernesto. Obras 1987–2011, an incredible and extensive exhibition by Ernesto Neto at San Ildefonso,invited everyone, including the nabobs of the art world, to cavort inside nylon-fabric structures and to try out fantastic prostheses. Though Neto’s work has been seen a lot in recent years, this mid-career retrospective breathed new excitement into his explorations of the senses. Even the Museo del Tequila y el Mezcal got in on the act with an exhibition of the work of Betsabeé Romero, a provocative artist who presented a variety of works and a clothed car, parked in the lively Plaza Garibaldi, that evokes the incredible vitality and rich nuance of Mexico City’s highly democratic car culture.
Outside of the fair, the galleries were able to give more space to many remarkable figures. In the new hot gallery zone, San Miguel Chapultepec, Kurimanzutto holds forth in the finest gallery complex I have visited anywhere. An exhibition by Gabriel Kuri spread across two spaces and demonstrated why this gallery has come to be seen as an international powerhouse. The work was conceptually rich and physically inventive in a way that reminded me of the excitement of SoHo in the 1980s. At LABOR, in a lovely new space that opened just in time for the fair, Pedro Reyes presented a rich and complex meditation on life and art.
I could not leave Mexico City without a little archaeological exploration, and my wishes were answered at the Templo Mayor, the unburied Aztec pyramid complex at the center of the city that displayed a newly discovered monumental sculpture long hidden under the city. Mexico City has one thing that you cannot find in New York or Los Angeles: thousands of years of cultural history under your feet. If the volcano is any sign, those subterranean historical forces are stirring and, combined with the seething energy above ground, this city’s cultural life history may soon boil over, or it might just explode.
Zona Maco took place between April 18 and April 22, 2012, in Mexico City.
While some works in This Side of Paradise lack the conceptual rigor of others, the complete exhibition constitutes a compelling hybrid of site-specific art programming and community engagement. Its success lies in its nature as an experiment in inclusion. Presented by No Longer Empty, This Side of Paradise displays artwork by more than twenty-six artists and collectives. The show is set in and curated in response to the Andrew Freedman Home, a former retirement home that aimed to protect once-wealthy seniors from the “degradations of poverty.”1 Founded in the 1920s, the residence operated into the 1980s and then fell into disrepair until its current renovation by a local citizens’ council.
The showfeatures two primary exhibition areas. Downstairs, a group exhibition occupies two impressive ballrooms. Upstairs, sprawling installations housed in decrepit suites give the impression of a ruin porn art hotel. In the former, Mel Chin’s S.O.S. Reloaded: Bronx 2012 (Message to the President—Straight off the Streets) (2012)is the timeliest project. This past spring, a video crew filmed local residents conveying their gratitude, admiration, suggestions, and appeals to President Obama. The subjects look intently into the camera while their words scroll across the screen. It’s moving and difficult to pull away from.
Nicky Enright’s and Bruce Richards’s works are poetic and evocative. In Enright’s installation, The Ravages (2012), the Freedman Home’s ancient typewriters and piano conceal a speaker that plays an instrumental piece with a fragmented Latin refrain. The piano-and-typewriter composition, which was written and performed by the artist, is somber and beautiful. Richards’s Formal Couples (1994) are a series of exquisitely detailed paintings on paper. The series combines bow ties and buttons with jeweled necklaces over dark backgrounds. Framed behind glass, the paintings function as black mirrors; the viewers’ images are reflected amid precious-looking adornments.
Adam Parker Smith’s I Lost All My Money in the Great Depression and All I Got Was This Room (2012) and Federico Uribe’s Persian Carpet (2012) are two works that invite comparison. Both feature large, patterned arrangements of cheap, everyday objects. In Smith’s work, candy, donuts, fake flowers, and other colorful junk are glued to walls in a Victorian ogee (onion-shaped) wallpaper motif. I found it elegantly composed, humorous, and exuberant. In Persian Carpet, Uribe amasses what could be the contents of a discount store: bobby pins, bicycle chains, clothes hangers, and other cheap products are arranged on a black plinth. Here, the materials seem convenient and tacky. Uribe’s wall text claims that the artist selected objects that the former residents would have used. But since the home “provided all the accoutrements of genteel living” including “white glove dinner service every night,” the contemporary objects—especially rakes, pliers, and tape measures—seem disjunctive.2
Adam Parker Smith. I Lost All My Money in the Great Depression and All I Got Was This Room, 2012; candy, pastries, plastic flowers and fruit, paper umbrellas, costume jewelry, Room 241. Courtesy of the Artist and Wave Hill. Photo: Whitney Browne for No Longer Empty.
Sylvia Plachy. Sitting Room: Remembering a Week in January, 2012; photography installation, Room 239. Courtesy of the Artist and No Longer Empty. Photo: Whitney Browne for No Longer Empty.
Other wall texts also exaggerate the site-responsiveness of the works on view or excessively buttress them, finding substance where viewers may find none. Due to my personal investment in positive psychology, I had high hopes for Matthew Chamorro and Daniel Paluska’s The Happy Post Project (2012). The wall text reveals grand ambitions: “The Happy Post Project is a social movement…[S]preading happiness is a powerful platform for social change.” Yet the project evinces little progress towards these goals. The installation comprises a messy room covered in sticky notes that bear pat responses—“Be happy” and “I love you”—to the pat prompt, “What makes you happy?” A Do Not Touch sign prohibits visitor participation. Children’s furniture, happy-face balloons, and a play ramp are also haphazardly arranged in the space. Through their selection of forms and materials, the artists present a simplistic and clichéd vision of happiness, in contrast to positive psychology’s complexity, urgency, research, and application. They also conflate art with expression and interaction with engagement. Chamorro and Paluska’s project has one fatal flaw: they never explain how the project increases happiness, the underlying assumption being that discussing emotions is tantamount to generating them.
A few installations focus on the inequity of the Freedman Home. Art Jones’s Paradise Lounge (2012) is a video collage featuring interviews with clients of the neighboring social service agency, contrasting the outside community with the former residents. Unfortunately the audio quality is so bad that there’s little appeal to listening. Justen Ladda’s Like Money, Like Water (2012) is a glow-in-the-dark anamorphic painted installation. Though Ladda’s installation is well executed, it does not rise above caricature. Standing in the right place, viewers will see the image of two skeletons pissing glittery dollar signs.
In this context, photographer Sylvia Plachy’s Sitting Room: Remembering a Week in January (2012) is notably sympathetic and humanizing. She recreates a resident’s room as she remembers it from a photo shoot she conducted for the Village Voice in 1980. Those black-and-white portraits are on view, and they bring their subjects closer to our time. Though the residents did not want for a catered lifestyle, they lacked strong social bonds with one another, as Vivian Gornick revealed in the accompanying Voice feature, also on view.
By opening the Freedman Home to such a diverse range of artists and members of the public, No Longer Empty transforms a once-exclusive establishment into a community asset. Hence, artworks and installations that object to the home’s past inequalities can feel a bit redundant. The opportunity to work site-responsively has produced both inventive and hamstrung results. In some ways, This Side of Paradise is a borough-wide convening of art, so misalignments between my sensibilities and the show can be expected. Countless Bronx community organizations are represented by way of collaborations with artists or mini exhibitions within the overarching show. Ostensible imperfections might be benign side effects of the project’s inclusivity. This situation can be seen as a dialectic wherein artistic excellence is considered inversely proportional to community inclusion. But an alternative view is to recalibrate the criteria for evaluation to the project’s intentions, which disperse curatorial authority and include manifold artistic voices.
This Side of Paradise is on view at 1125 Grand Concourse, in the Bronx, through June 5, 2012.
________ NOTES:
1. Text quoted from the exhibition’s curatorial statement.
Thumbnail: Bonnie Sherk. Sitting Still II, November 1970, from the Sitting Still series (still); performance, Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Research Library and Archives. Photo: Campbell/Chamois Moon.
Entering the lower level of the Berkeley Art Museum to view State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, I was instantly transported into a historic moment as I encountered Paul Kos’s The Sound of Ice Melting (1970/2011), a wonderful early play on audience participatory artwork. Absurdist, Buddhist, and Arte Povera in attitude and reference, Kos’s piece in this instance was also informed by Ella Fitzgerald’s melodic voice wafting from the nearby museum café, which set a romantic tone for my quiet, mid-afternoon visit.
Walking toward the stairs that lead to the museum’s main level, Tom Marioni’s Process Print (1969), together with Terry Fox’s match and smoke piece, Untitled (1970-71), on a wall opposite, create a natural segue into an expanded consideration of the actions-based art of several key Conceptual artists. John Knight’s I Assumed (1972)—a set of fifty text works on index cards—introduces language-based Conceptual art, and these first glimpses of the exhibition are rounded out by John Baldessari’s Throwing Three Balls Into the Air to get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-six Attempts) (1973). Baldessari’s artist’s book demonstrates his systems-based attempts to create an “arbitrary order” while simultaneously acknowledging that all systems of ordering are arbitrary. In this introductory spatial arrangement, State of Mind presents actions, language, and systems as the three main branches of Conceptual art by simply showing, rather than telling, viewers these roots of California Conceptualist practice during the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Performance and the central positioning of the artist are vital aspects of ’70s Conceptual art and are represented in this gallery by key artists and works like T.R. Uthco’s (Doug Hall, Jody Proctor, and Diane Andrews Hall) 8 Gestures (1970/2011). A sense of humor, which Hall describes as “performances for the camera,” emerges in the work almost like a series of sketches. Richard Jackson’s Moon Piece (1970)—a minimalist photographic series of lines in black space—introduces ideas about chance in art making, a heritage generally linked to John Cage. Of particular significance here is Alexis Smith’s Charlie Chan Piece (1973), which brings gender play into the mix. Such pieces reinforce the value assigned to the artist or the participant as subject during this period.
However, the rest of the exhibition is in tension with the synergistic “state of mind” clearly depicted in the museum’s first gallery. Because of the fact that Conceptual art is idea based rather than media based, much of the work on view is photographic and video documentation of performances—documentation that necessarily falls short of the actual, collective experience of viewers at the time. The complexity of representing this allied sensibility is reinforced by the fact that the exhibition sets out to illuminate the elements that made California Conceptualism distinctive from its counterpart on the East Coast: the focus on “collectivity, ephemerality, body-oriented performance, the merging of art and life, political commentary, and social interaction”—ideas
Paul McCarthy. May 1, 1971 (detail), 1971; twenty-five projected slides. Courtesy of the Artist and Hauser and Wirth.
William Wegman. A Basic Guide to Lettering, 1972; two black-and-white photographs; 11 x 14 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.
that have continued to influence artists over the past forty years. This meta-narrative is met by the exhibition but at a cost, and the immediacy of much of the original work is difficult for an uninitiated viewer to grasp.1
As a result, some of the works that suffer the most are those focused on location, such as Paul McCarthy’s May 1, 1971 (1971) and Douglas Huebler’s Location Piece #6, Los Angeles, March 1969 (1969). While these artists were interested in what defined urban spaces, their ability to communicate to viewers diminishes by proximity to such deliberate pieces as Kos’s video Roping Boar’s Tusk (1971) and William Wegman’s photographic diptych A Basic Guide to Lettering (1972). The insertion of human subject matter into Kos’s video and Wegman’s photographs—which were performed specifically for the camera—creates a sense of immediacy and inserts a welcome comedic sidebar into the artists’ play with spatial perception. However, there are some projects that can be readily appreciated in their documentary form, such as Bonnie Sherk’s Portable Parks and Sitting Still series (both 1970), which were performed and documented at unique locations including the former James Lick Freeway that crossed over Market Street and the lion house at the San Francisco Zoo.
One of the most significant aspects of Conceptual art practice was the exploration of the liminal space where art and life meet, and some of the most powerful works representing this practice are those where the artist has worked with his or her body as primary medium.2 Again, the explorations range from such personal/political pieces as Terry Fox’s Pisces (1971), a response to his struggle with Hodgkin’s disease, to Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972), a thirty-day weight-loss documentation. The often gendered difference in such a body-oriented performance space becomes evident when comparing endurance works. One such study in contrasts is Chris Burden’s play with danger and death (Shoot, 1971) and Linda Montano’s sustained art/life works, such as her three-hour-long Lying: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (Chicken Bed) (1972) and her 1973 three-day performance in which she handcuffed herself to artist Tom Marioni. Barbara T. Smith’s Feed Me (1973/2009) operates in the interval between these two extremes—danger and violence opposed to attenuated stillness. For this performance, Smith allowed visitors to enter a space where she left herself open to any interaction with them, effectively shifting responsibility for behavior onto the audience or performance. Conversely, Suzanne Lacy, whose work includes perpetual concern with spectacles of violence against women and animals, engages with a level of activism that earned her the debatable distinction of being labeled a “feminist” rather than a Conceptual artist.
For this curator and art historian, who has had a long-time appreciation for the ground-breaking work and achievements of these artists, it is difficult to admit that this ambitious exhibition ultimately cannot fully capture the imagination and vibrancy of the art and the creative milieu cultivated during the early ’70s. However, rather than a curatorial shortcoming, this contradiction points out that as much as we can appreciate what these artists have accomplished, it is fundamentally difficult to digest a surfeit of performance documentation in an exhibition context. Nevertheless, in combination with the intelligent catalogue written in part by the exhibition’s curators, Constance Lewallan of the Berkeley Art Museum and Karen Moss of the Orange County Museum of Art, the works in State of Mind provide tangible insights into the actual state of mind of California Conceptualists,circa 1970.3
State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 is on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum through June 17, 2012.
2. State of Mind also explores such works as Lynn Hershman’s The Dante Hotel (1973-74) and Allen Ruppersberg’s Al’s Grand Hotel (1971), which deal in significantly different ways with the role of a viewer in relationship to the art (voyeur vs. participant). Mel Henderson’s Attica (1972) and Martha Rosler’s series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72) provide harsh and ironic commentary on our ongoing wars abroad and at home.
3. State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 (2011) features additional essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson and Anne Rorimer.
Thumbnail: John Chiara. Coral: Marview: Burnett (Stereographic), 2012; dye destruction process, two unique photographs, diptych; each: 41 x 36 in framed. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.
John Chiara’s exhibition, Crestmont at Coral, is universally compelling; its less successful pieces diminished only by the resonant power of the other artworks. The twelve pieces that compose his first solo show with Haines Gallery were created through a unique photographic process that Chiara has developed over the past decade. They evidence his subtle control over unstable methods and his mature willingness to take risks. Physically, the works in Cresmont at Coral are more intimate than the large landscapes Chiara has shot in the past. They are all vertically oriented, neither huge nor small, and create private spaces in which to reflect. The elegiac, sun-soaked vistas they depict evoke a half-remembered, soulful longing that grows and deepens with prolonged contemplation.
Chiara’s is a strange sort of photography. He makes his work using large, hand-built cameras, the biggest of which he hauls around on a trailer. In contrast to the speed and immediacy of today’s digital imaging, photographing with these cameras is painstaking and laborious, rarely yielding more than a few shots per day. Chiara’s exposures are each unique because he shoots positives onto Ilfochrome paper rather than negatives onto film. Developing each shot by hand in a sealed PVC pipe magnifies the idiosyncrasies—the irregular effects of chemistry and agitation combining with artifacts from light leaks, erratically cut edges, residual tape marks, and Chiara’s intuitive in-camera dodging and burning. The resulting artworks are amalgamated objects—equal parts sculpture, drawing, and painting.
It is easy to focus on the novelty of Chiara’s process, in part because it curiously harkens back to the daguerreotypes of yesteryear and simultaneously resonates with a contemporary DIY aesthetic. Novelty aside, the work Chiara produces is impressive even without one knowing how it was created. Numerous aspects of the pieces should not work but do: the jaggedly cut photo paper; the out-of-focus, overly dark, and blown-out exposures; and the glare that ripples across each work’s undulating surface. Such effects on their own are crude and unrefined, but together these elements alchemically combine and become elegant.
While the golden-hued Coral End (2012) and cloud-strewn Starr King at Coral (2012) are both standout individual works, the strongest pieces in the exhibition are its three diptychs. The first, Goldmine: Diamond: Coral (2012), presentstwo near-duplicate images of an eerie, misty green, scrub-covered hillside. Each is a double exposure that merges two views from the same location. By doubling this layered construction, Chiara highlights both the inimitable nature of the process and the critical impact of the work’s irregular edges, incidental chemical effects, and residual tape marks—rather than true copies, the two halves exist as divergent twins. When a viewer compares one image to the other, similarities and differences emerge. Rather than working to decode any riddle, the act of continually looking back and forth builds a meditative sensation similar to watching waves break endlessly on a beach.
The other horizontal diptych, Coral: Marview: Burnett (Stereographic) (2012), acts in a similar fashion to the first, presenting a pair of double exposures, side by side. However,
John Chiara. Goldmine: Diamond: Coral, 2012; dye destruction process, two unique photographs; each: 41 x 36 in framed. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.
John Chiara. Crestmont End (Upper-East and Lower-East), 2012; dye destruction process, two unique photographs; each: 41 x 36 in framed. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.
instead of nearly identical images, it presents photographic triangulations from similar but slightly displaced vantage points. This bifocal effect, hinted at by the parenthetical content of its title, produces a shifting, swirling sensation as one looks back and forth at the two halves. In both images, glittering beams of sunlight pierce and refract in the milky opalescent atmosphere. This sun-soaked sheen, like the rest of Chiara’s process, obscures as much as it reveals and inflects the work with a sense of foreboding.
Unlike the other two diptychs, Crestmont End (Upper-East and Lower-East) (2012)has a vertical orientation, and its two halves present single though overlapping images of the same location. The vertical stacking accentuates the stand of slender eucalyptus trees that is partially present in the lower image and fully depicted in the upper. The trees spring from the top of a tiered concrete retaining wall, dotted with twiggy shrubs and dangling rosemary. A solitary streetlight stands like a sentinel in the center of the lower image and pokes its head into the image above. Stretched across the two images, the scene feels impossibly tall; the trees loom menacingly and induce a lingering disquiet that cannot be shrugged off.
The imagery in all of Chiara’s work is mundane—neglected urban infrastructure and unremarkable landscapes edged by overgrown embankments. Yet somehow in Chiara’s hands, these otherwise banal scenes become quietly mythic. Neither joyful nor nostalgic, they exist in a place of bitter sweetness akin to adult remembrances of childhood. They are glittering remnants of fleeting moments, sun-drenched ghosts that capture the inexplicable way certain details persist in our psyches. They are photographs that do not so much depict memories as capture what it feels like to remember.
Crestmont at Coral is on view at Haines Gallery, in San Francisco, through May 26, 2012.
Thumbnail: Alice Shaw. Making A Mountain Range Out Of A Mole Hill, 2012; hand-cut photograph; 10.25 x 14 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.
The profusion of works and materials in Alice Shaw’s Landscape Update at Gallery 16 leaves viewers with the impression of a frenzy. The twenty-six works on view are made from an exhaustive array of media: paintings of oil and dye on linen; sculptures of cast bronze and concrete; photographs, including pigment, Van Dyke brown, and gelatin silver prints; and drawings or hybrid works of charcoal, ink, and gold leaf. Though the artist’s goal of exploring the landscape through various methods and materials is admirable, the effect is less comprehensive than it is schizophrenic. There are moments when Shaw’s depictions of a natural world sullied by human presence do shine, but overall the exhibition could have been improved by the notion that less is more.
Despite the show being weakened by the surfeit of approaches, there are many works that are intriguing and funny. Gum Print (2012) is a close-up, black-and-white photograph of a tree trunk that nearly blocks the view of the wild valley and pine-studded ridge beyond. The proximity of the trunk provides rich details of the rugged bark, showing bits of moss and an old bent nail stuck amongst its crevices; the image is so crisply captured that a viewer can almost feel the rough textures. However, the print is contaminated by a wad of actual chewing gum stuck nonchalantly to the center of the trunk: a rose-pink blot of detritus that undercuts the serenity of the scene. The wad is in a rounded, larval shape that could be an organic part of this natural scene if it weren’t for its man-made color. From an oblique angle, a viewer can see threads of sticky pink residue that stretch from the print to the inner surface of the framing glass—the same way that trodden gum stretches from the urban pavement to one’s shoe. For Shaw, no pristine vista will remain untouched by human carelessness.
Many of the best works in the show exhibit the same kind of offhand wisecrack. Making A Mountain Range Out Of A Mole Hill (2012) is a small, black-and-white vista of foothills covered in conifers. The top edge of the photo has been cut
Alice Shaw. The Back 40, 2012; linen, wood, wire, and dye; 26.5 x 22 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.
Alice Shaw. Gum Print, 2012; archival pigment print; 20.5 x 28.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.
into three sharp triangles, a child’s simplified vision of mountain peaks. This straightforward maneuver transforms the image from a documentary representation to a commentary on human endeavor and the will to strike at nature until it yields to human desire. The photo is float-mounted in its frame, and the shadow that falls on the mat underneath increases the depth of the image.
It is not only the photographs that have this wry humor. The Back 40 (2012) is a clever hybrid sculpture/painting of a canvas made from unbleached linen stretched on a wood frame and turned to face the wall. The back and raw edges of fabric are tacked to the stretchers with small black-headed nails. The canvas has been dipped in dye so that a soft horizon line appears about six inches from the bottom edge. Above this minimal landscape is the work’s hanging hardware, and rising between the customary eye screws to left and right, the wire is configured with crags and steppes that peak in the center of the work to form the shape of a mountain. The unfinished wood, natural tones of the raw linen, black nails, and thick black wire all contribute to the work’s old-West feel, and the title coyly alludes to the acreage behind the old RKO Pictures lot in Culver City where movies and TV series like Bonanza (1959–79) were filmed. It suggests the landscape here is just a construct, a backdrop for the real action that might be on the canvas’s front.
Unfortunately, other works in Landscape Update don’t provide the same visual or conceptual punch. Throwing in the Towel (2011) looks like a random snapshot of coniferous treetops, and The Eradication of Invasive Species (2012) depicts a gunshot-pocked, yellow-and-black “Watch for Cows” sign that drivers might see along sections of Highway 1. The sculptures in the show, which include a cassette tape cast in concrete and some detritus cast in bronze, are similarly unthrilling.
Thankfully, the first and last image that a visitor sees in Landscape Update is Curtain Call (2012), a large photographic print on canvas that hangs from rods and aluminum brackets like a projection screen. The color-saturated print depicts the view across a clearing or meadow to the edge of a piney wood, beyond which looms a range of mountains with a fine sift of snow. In the azure sky, a faint half-moon has just cleared the crest. The shadows on the ground suggest that the day is coming to a close. On the right side of the meadow, a fat tree trunk lies on the ground, denuded of all its thick branches, the cuts still a fresh golden brown against the weathered gray trunk. To the left of the print, a curtain of deep magenta silk dupioni lined with ecru cotton reveals this landscape to viewers. The curtain complicates the image in a satisfying way: is the scene being revealed or, as the title suggests, is this our last look before the curtain falls? Seeing this piece in the context of some of the other works in the show, viewers might assume that the light is soon lost, and this is the last glimpse before the sun sets and the theater of nature goes black.
Landscape Update is a display of potential rather than a fully resolved exhibition. Considering that nearly all the works in the show were made in the past three months, it is clear that Shaw is dedicated to her practice. Yet the artist’s enthusiasm and wry sense of humor do not ameliorate the excess of works and materials. I can’t help but think that if it had been carefully culled by half, Landscape Update would have been an excellent view of Shaw’s aims and talents alike.
Landscape Update is on view at Gallery 16, in San Francisco, through April 21, 2012.
As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is pleased to republish Bean Gilsdorf's review, "Weaving, Not Cloth: Mark Bradford," which you can also read here at Daily Serving.
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The difficulty in viewing photographs of artwork is that the camera flattens the object in its focus, relinquishing subtleties in order to capture a whole. Because his oeuvre is very subtle indeed, Mark Bradford’s work requires a viewer’s presence to be fully appreciated. Very little of the slender lines of collage, delicate papers built up in thin layers or washes of paint almost completely sanded away is apparent in reproduction. Each of the more than forty of Bradford’s works now on view at SFMOMA calls out to be felt, if not by the hand of the viewer then by the eye. They elicit a state of tactile vision, a reminder that visual perception is also connected to the faculty of touch.
In the scholarship regarding his work, much has been made of the condition and location of Bradford’s studio practice. He grew up (and still lives) in South Central Los Angeles, a mainly black neighborhood mythologized for its urban decay. Bradford worked at his mother’s hair salon before attending art school, learning skills that he would adapt to his practice: hard work, repetitive actions, and tactile processes. He gleans his materials from the posters, billboard papers, and hair salon permanent-wave end papers that are still part of his environment. And while all this information surely contributes to an important analysis of his work based in socio-economics, race, and culture, it ignores the physicality and lushness of the actual surfaces and the connection of Bradford’s work to textiles.
Up close, the dense materiality of each piece intrigues with a kind of sumptuous dissolution; there is tension between order and chaos, rigid geometries and decay. Layers and layers of papers and paint built up over time manifest the tactile nature of his working process, while the sanding between layers wears away the visible to the point of ruin. Each surface affirms Bradford’s physical presence—these are techniques that can only be achieved by putting sinew and muscle in service of production.
Though he calls them paintings, Bradford’s work more precisely exists in the productive space between painting, collage, and textiles. Many of the smaller and mid-scale collages are built on stretched canvases, allusions to the image-framing and containment of the traditional painting. However, several larger works are created on unstretched canvas that adds a layer of dimensionality to the form. For example, the surface of You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You) (2009) undulates like fabric—it’s not really flat at all—and the edges are ragged and crusted with cracked paint. Though I include a photograph of the work above, the camera fails to capture the tangible thicknesses at the edges of torn papers, the white areas sanded smooth, the divots and pockmarks in the grids, or the directional marks of a brush dragged through thick gel medium. These surfaces create the haptic character of the work.
Moreover, Bradford’s methodology and compositions echo weavings and piecework. As with textiles, the surfaces of Bradford’s work are created by obsessive repetition, much like a weaving is created by passing the shuttle back and forth on the loom. Bradford carefully slices billboard papers and posters into fine strips and layers them densely. From a distance, these arrangements of horizontal and vertical strips resemble the over-and-under patterning of a woven cloth. Likewise, the use of permanent-wave end papers in repetitive sequences across the surface calls to mind the geometries of quilts and other fabric constructions. Combining the visual motifs of textile forms with the visual tactility of the haptic creates a connection to textiles that other analyses have overlooked.
Since not much has been made of the work’s connection to cloth, I was eager to ask Bradford about this perceived reference to textiles. During our conversation in one quiet gallery of the museum, the artist confirmed this relationship, stating that his mother and grandmother were seamstresses. Bradford remembers his mother’s lessons of choosing fabric. “I grew up touching,” he told me, “I would find a fabric that looked good and [my mother] would tell me, no, it’s not good fabric, just feel it.” In the museum the eye acts as a surrogate for the fingers, passing over each ripple, raw edge, or smoothly sanded surface. The haptic nature of Bradford’s work combined with the compositional reference to textiles creates an altogether visceral experience of looking at weavings that are not cloth.
After spending an afternoon with Joseph Noderer’s paintings at Linda Warren Projects, I couldn’t decide if I should go and watch children play with puppies or down a bottle of bourbon. Viewing his work can be an unsettling experience; the paintings have a sketchy quality, and his quick brushstrokes describe the lonelier aspects of life in the disregarded corners of the rural South and the southwestern United States. Noderer paints dilapidated houses, shacks, and mobile homes, placed centrally in the composition and surrounded by encroaching trees and foliage, which gives them the appearance of solitary figures embedded in hostile environments. His works have a moody quality more commonly found in psychologically charged portraiture than landscapes. The artist’s deft paint-handling suggests an intimate knowledge of his subject matter—Noderer currently resides outside of Austin, Texas—yet his skillful brushwork also conveys a sense of urgency, as though he feels a need to capture what is essential and move on. Far from constituting a love letter to Dixie, these images are stand-ins for the same bleak state of mind that birthed the blues and the sorrowful “lost my lady, lost my truck, and lost my dog all in the same day” lyrical sentiments idiomatic of early country music.
Untitled (2011) is a prime example of Noderer’s anxiety-imbued landscapes. The painting features a weathered cabin glimpsed through—or being swallowed by—a dense emerald-green jungle. The naturalistic light suggests a tangibly humid climate, compounding the work’s suffocating atmosphere. Trees and post beams create alternating vertical lines redolent of prison bars, while a bleached-white tree branch bisecting the image blocks the viewer’s point of entry into the precariously structured cabin. In Noderer’s work, a man-made home, with its promise of rooted domesticity, is no rival for nature’s power of reclamation.
Rather than infusing his paintings with dark hues to convey a depressed mood, Noderer uses naturalistic mid-value tones
Joseph Noderer. The Nights Progress, 2012; acrylic on wood panel; 30 x 38 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Linda Warren Projects.
Joseph Noderer. Brushy Creek Belle, 2011; acrylic on wood panel; 36 x 38 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Linda Warren Projects.
to create a complex range of emotional nuances. Works such as Big Puddle II (2010), Sunday (2010), and Store II (2010) rely on color and light to produce an almost Impressionistic sense of atmosphere. The flat, even light depicted in Big Puddle II—an image of fenced-off pink and yellow houses pressed between the edge of a wet street and two looming trees—replicates the diffuse haze common after a midday shower. In Sunday, bands of chromatic temperature alternate: a cool grey road, a warm brown plot, an icy whitewashed shed, under a rusty warped rooftop, below a cool grey-blue sky. The effect is a fleeting moment of stark beauty.
Noderer hones this moody atmosphere in Gregory House (2012) and Brushy Creek Belle (2011). In these works, oddly colored skies begin to veer from naturalistic representation. The peach-toned sky in Brushy Creek Belle could capture the glow of a setting sun, but the color is too flat—seeming more like a wall than open space. The green sky over Gregory House is equally impenetrable; it combines with the leaning bungalow and shabby overgrown yard in the foreground to create a discordant feeling to the work, though here Noderer intensifies the psychological aspects of his work beyond his earlier mimetic representations of the environment. But why not alter more than just these few elements? The introduction of these manipulations suggests Noderer is in a transitional phase of his landscape/mindscape exploration. Though this direction is promising, the balance between nature and otherworldliness rests too comfortably in its current iteration. In taking this slight detour away from naturalistic description, the artist draws viewers deeper into his vivid interior world. But the small to medium scale of the paintings is an impediment to their visual and emotional impact.
If these recent landscapes are a bit too cautious, two portraits in the show fly in the face of that restraint. Subtlety and nuance are abandoned altogether in The Nights Progress (2012), for example. In this work, two green heads are connected by a tangled mass of organs, which could be spewed intestines or spilled brains or both. The gory heads float over one of Noderer’s shack-in-the-woods landscapes—perhaps an exaggerated conceptualization of the artist’s own practice. This image trades too freely in blunt shock value. The atmospheric, slow burn of the artist’s 2010 landscapes conveys mood without slipping into the didacticism of his more recent forays into surrealism and portraiture. Noderer is clearly a talented painter and, as evidenced in Ain’t No Reason to Hang My Head, he has produced interesting and divergent images in what appears to be a phase of experimentation.
Joseph Noderer. Ain’t No Reason to Hang My Head is on view at Linda Warren Projects, in Chicago, through April 21, 2012.
Thumbnail: John William Waterhouse. Saint Cecilia, 1895; oil on canvas; 48.5 x 79 in. Courtesy of The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco.
The temptation to sigh and swoon through The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900, at the Legion of Honor, is strong. The mostly male artists gathered here have borrowed the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s concept of “Art for art’s sake,” producing art whose primary aim was formal beauty. It’s equally tempting to dismiss the Aesthetic Movement in England, of which they were a part, as a moment of escapism before the cultural and political tumults Britain endured throughout the twentieth century. But it’s hard to bemoan the absence of moral, religious, and ethical themes in the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, John William Waterhouse, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Aubrey Beardsley. Their veneration of beauty as the primary, or even exclusive, concern of art is surprisingly seductive.
The Cult of Beauty focuses on the movement’s contributions to both the decorative arts and the “fine” ones (not that these champions of the aesthetic would have necessarily differentiated between the two categories). By applying their blinkered obsession to every facet of their lives, these artists created the first incarnation of what we might describe today as lifestyle porn, designing furniture, wallpaper, ceramics, textiles, and more. Several installation walls are papered in modern reproductions of William Morris or Edward Godwin designs: elaborate patterns involving swans, peacock feathers, and flowers in rich, liberally gilded earth tones. These wallpapers refute the accepted minimalist wisdom that less is more when it comes to interior decor. Though rich with motifs and bold colors, they are not cluttered or noisy, offering proof that a room’s visual harmony can be enhanced, rather than jeopardized, by complicated design elements and patterns. Building on the achievements of the celebrated Victorian gift book binders, the artists of the Aesthetic Movement also experimented with print, emphasizing beauty in the typography, cover design, paper, presswork, and illustrations of their books.1
The edition of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play Salome designed and illustrated by Beardsley is a striking example: at over ten inches in length, presumably to accommodate the illustrations, it is clearly designed to be treated as a work of art in itself rather than as something to carry around and read on the train. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema created some of the remarkable pieces of furniture on view, including a mahogany chair with cedar and ebony veneer and ivory and abalone shell inlay. The artist clearly prioritized its appearance over its comfort or utility.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Day Dream, 1880; oil on canvas; 62.5 x 36.5 in. Courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco. Photo: Ronald Stoops.
Aubrey Beardsley. Cover of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, 1920; book with reproductions of sixteen drawings published by John Lane, The Bodley Head; 10.25 x 8 x.75 in. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco.
Alma-Tadema was also a revered painter in his time, and it is puzzling why curators chose not to include more of his fine art work and less of Albert Moore’s. The men painted similar subjects: people, especially women of the English Rose variety, in classical settings. But Alma-Tadema was more adept at rendering movement and texture—skin, marble, flower petals—and as a result his paintings bear a vitality that Moore’s pretty but lifeless classical mannequin depictions do not.
The ideological and pictorial apogee of the Aesthetic Movement is arguably found in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, the commonly used name for a group of painters working in the second half of the nineteenth century who emulated the style of early Italian artists. Other painters of the movement, such as Frederic Leighton and Whistler, shared the Pre-Raphaelites’ concern with beauty but created work that was more straightforward, situating their attractive subjects in recognizable, realistic settings and scenarios. The Pre-Raphaelites looked to other times, exhibiting a fondness for romanticized stories of medieval and renaissance femme fatales. In an era of catastrophically restrictive clothing, Edward Burne-Jones and John Spencer Stanhope painted women in stylized historical costumes that reveal the natural shape of their bodies, their clothing sensually draping around their bosoms and between their legs.2 With the exception of the titular figure in John William Waterhouse’s Saint Cecilia (1895), none of these women look particularly virginal. Indeed, Rossetti portrays his muse, Jane Morris, with all the languid sexuality of a silent film siren in The Day Dream (1880).
For all these paintings’ lack of message, their effect is powerful. There is a reason why Pre-Raphaelite has become shorthand to describe curly-haired, redheaded women. There is also a reason why a senior curator at the Tate Britain remarked in 2007 that if they don’t show the works of this “Victorian Brotherhood” they get complaints from teenage girls.3 The reference to teenage girls may seem dismissive, but there’s something to it. The art we love when we are young tends to be art that we can lose ourselves in and that fires our imagination. The Waterhouse monograph I bought at fifteen is dog-eared from my frequent adolescent perusals because I wanted to live in it; I wanted to believe that the world could look like that; I imagined myself in those paintings, draped in rich fabrics, flowers in my hair, pensively thumbing a book of poetry.
While art from other movements may provoke and challenge or overtly engage with the issues of its time and place, the question Aestheticism asks is a closed one: is beauty alone really a worthy object of veneration? Beauty is Aestheticism’s raison d’être, and escapism is its unavoidable byproduct. It’s not difficult to trace a line from Wilde's principle of the “House Beautiful” to the aspirational fantasies fueled and reflected by Etsy, Pinterest, and Martha Stewart’s Living.4 And as the Tate curator’s comment reveals, the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites also hold a fascination for young daydreamers as well as their adult counterparts—but not without good reason.
Spending an afternoon amidst so much work concerned with neither ideology nor morals but beauty writ large feels like an unusual opportunity to reconnect with the impulses toward romance and fantasy that perhaps governed our tastes at an earlier point in our lives. But The Cult of Beauty also reminds us that the fashion for art that sidestepped the more difficult aspects of human existence was just that—a fashion. Regardless of the wonders they might see and seek out, not all cults survive. The Aesthetes offered a vision of the world as they wished it were, but it is from other artists that we must seek how to live in the world as it is.
The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900 is currently on view at the Legion of Honor, in San Francisco, though June 17, 2012.
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1. Their preoccupation with all aspects of “the Book Beautiful” (in Aestheticism, the adjective always seems to follow the noun) is echoed today in the fetishization of physical books that has developed in tandem with the virtual publishing industry. See Tess Thackara, "Beauty and the Book," Art Practical 50 (2012).
2. Incidentally, many of the wives and girlfriends of the Aesthetics went corset-less a half century before Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel introduced the notion in their fashions.
4. “The House Beautiful” was the title of a lecture Wilde gave in Woodstock, Ontario in 1882, which covered the early Aesthetic Movement's influence on interior design. The phrase, much like Wilde himself, became synonymous with the Movement.
Thumbnail: Forest Bess. The Noble Carbunkle, 1960; oil on canvas; 30 x 49.5 in. Private collection; courtesy of Amy Wolf Fine Art, New York.
As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is pleased to bring you Madeline McLean's review, “The 2012 Whitney Biennial: A Rehabilitated Production,”which you can also read here at Daily Serving.
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The beginning of March sees New York erupt in an art world flurry with the seventy-fifth Whitney Biennial igniting the itinerary for the next couple months of art fairs, large-scale exhibitions, auctions, and not least of all, the parties that accompany such events. Presented by Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, who formed a fortuitous curatorial duo, the 2012 Biennial shone brighter than the previous Biennial in 2010 for many reasons. Sussman, curator/Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Sanders, a freelance curator, writer, and dealer for New York’s Greene Naftali gallery, not only pared down the number of exhibited artists, but also incited a dialogue that is both timely and urgent.
This year, the Biennial acts as a platform – or even a forum if you will – for comprehending the expanded fields of contemporary art in relation to performance, film, literary, multi-media and curatorial praxis. Whereas the Biennial in 2010 acted as an acknowledgment of a benchmark – that being the year 2010 – taking its thesis from the roots of retrospection. It looked towards the history of the Whitney Biennial since its inception in 1932, in honoring the structure and legacy of the Biennial, while also commenting on the political and social structures of rehabilitation that were propagated from certain instances such as the presidential election of Barack Obama. Unfortunately – and probably at the fault of an overly expansive thesis – the 2010 Biennial fell flat, quite simply, and was remarkably unmemorable for me. However, the 2012 Biennial this year not only commands more cohesiveness in both content and intention, but its presentation of works from fifty-one artists – a list edited more so than any Biennial to date – granted a substantial significance to the curation as a whole production.
The 2012 Biennial, poignantly dedicated to the late Mike Kelley who passed away earlier this year, presents artists at all points in their careers, in a vast array of media from painting, sculpture, photography, installation, music, theater, film and dance. Not only did curators Sussman and Sanders instigate the notion of the “expanded field of the arts”, but they very much emphasized the connective points between one practice to another, or similarly one profession to another. As quoted in the 2012 Biennial press release, both Sussman and Sanders remarks that, “[…] a number of artists are functioning as researchers and curators, drawing on the histories of art, design, dance, music and technology. Artists are bringing other artists into their work – a form of free collage or reinvention that borrows from the culture at large as a way of rewriting the standard narratives and exposing more relevant hybrids”.
One of the most noteworthy aspects of the 2012 Biennial is the 6,000-square foot performance arena designed on the fourth floor. Complete with viewing bleachers, this space is dedicated to musical, dance, theatrical (et al.) performances through the end of the Biennial. Performances directed by choreographers such as Michael Clark and Sarah Michelson, as well as various musical acts such as the experimental rock band The Red Krayola and soprano singer Alicia Hall Moran, turn the fourth floor space into a theater of expansive talent, blurring the boundaries between context and vocation.
Werner Herzog. Hearsay of the Soul, 2012; four-channel digital projection of twenty etchings by Hercules Segers with music by Ernst Reijseger; installation view, Whitney Biennial 2012. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Dawn Kasper. THIS COULD BE SOMETHING IF I LET IT (from the series Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment, 2009– ), 2012; three-month durational performance and multimedia installation; installation view, Whitney Biennial 2012. Courtesy of the Artist and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
In relation to the subject of context, Dawn Kasper will transform a back gallery on the third floor into her personal studio and living space, entitled THIS COULD BE SOMETHING IF I LET IT (2012). Reminiscent of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-Ins during the Vietnam War era, albeit not necessarily in activist intent, Kasper speaks about the dichotomy present relating to the immediacy of human connection in an otherwise very intimate space, such as a bedroom or artist’s studio space.
The unparalleled presence of film and thus the artistic dialogue centered within filmic studies is a noteworthy supplement to this year’s Biennial. The film program, co-curated by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, strives to point out the significant advances in film and video within the past decade in conjunction to those in contemporary art. From short, experimental video pieces such as Hearsay of the Soul (2012) by Werner Herzog and selected works from George Kuchar’s Weather Diaries (1977–2011) series, to lengthier features such as The Oath (2010) by Laura Poitras (who was nominated for an Emmy, an Academy Award and an Independent Spirit Award for her post-9/11 film My Country, My Country (2006)), exemplify the vast conglomeration of video art and film. And what is a Biennial dedicated to Mike Kelley without a substantial serving of Mike Kelley? Three of his films from the series Mobile Homestead (2010–11) present a vignette of Detroit’s civil history as the narrative to his public art project in his hometown. With the film and performance programs initiated this way, viewers can return several times to attend the array of performance acts, which insures an extended interaction with the public, a relationship to whom an institution is always beholden.
Some of my personal favorites were photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier in her Homebody series (2010) in which she dons her deceased grandfather and grandmother’s personal (and intimate) items, such as pajamas or blankets, in their abandoned apartment as an act of lamentation. Sam Lewitt’s installation entitled Fluid Employment (2012)made from poured ferromagnetic liquid elucidates the medium’s immaculate traits in its imminent usage in electronic devices such as hard drives. The peripheral retrospective curated by artist Robert Gober on Forest Bess (1911–1977) – which, in the very act of his curation, acted as a perfect extension to Gober’s own practice – was astounding in content. Exposing the enigmatic and mentally unstable modern artist Forest Bess, Gober paints a character sketch of Bess by virtue of paintings, extensive wall texts, archival letters (exchanges between his New York dealer Betty Parsons) and photographs. If a large painting of a unicorn didn’t attract me enough, it was certainly the psychosis that manifested itself in hermaphroditic self-mutilations that sealed the deal for me. Installations by Lutz Bacher, Cameron Crawford and Luther Price’s handmade and manipulated film slides are not to be missed either.
Conclusively, the 2012 Whitney Biennial was a concisely edited and masterfully conceptualized project. A well-grounded understanding and use of the various spaces within and around the museum give Sussman and Sanders a virtuosic credit. I am relieved to see that a spotlight has finally been shown on both performance and filmic arts, in all of their realms and sub-categories, especially in a biennial setting. Several members of the Whitney staff exclaim the serendipitous team that Sussman and Sanders made in numerous paragraphs in the press literature and it is clear when experiencing the materialization of their collaboration. This is a biennial that has me delighted in saying that I will return several times.
In the fall of 2011, Creative Time presented Living as Form, an expansive exhibition at New York City’s Essex Street Market that included more than one hundred social-practice projects exploring the nexus of art and life. At times overwhelming and enlightening, the ambitious exhibition served as a complement to the equally frenetic and inspiring third annual Creative Time summit. In the spirit of inclusion and given the global cross-section of participants, a touring version of the exhibition is now traveling to a diverse range of venues around the world, beginning at the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco.
Kadist’s Living as Form (The Nomadic Version) is a distilled version of the original show and was adapted by necessity to fit the significantly more compact venue. This constraint, aided by the considered decisions of the Oakland-based curator and writer Christina Linden, also makes the exhibition’s aims clearer and more accessible. [Editor’s note: Linden is also an Art Practical contributor, and the Kadist Art Foundation underwrites Art Practical’s Visiting Artist Profile series.] Of the Creative Time archive’s 366 projects, fifty were chosen to travel via hard drive to the host venues, and each host can add up to fifteen new projects to its local exhibition. Both the online archive and the fifty projects on the hard drive present challenges to the exhibition organizers by virtue of their unedited presentation and sheer number. Each curator is tasked with culling works from these materials and mounting a physical exhibition that will resonate with a local audience. Linden elected to divide her exhibition into three components: a static window display with a weekly rotation of content, a video screening that changes every fortnight, and an archive room where visitors can view any of the fifty projects.
Living as Form takes on the formidable challenges of connecting social practice to the real world and presenting documentation as an aesthetic medium. Many socially engaged artists who work with non-art communities are understandably more concerned with the actual project than the resulting documentation, and Linden deliberately chose for the screening room five videos that are compelling visual and social documents. For example, Fairytale: 1001 Chinese Visitors (2007), which is on view from March 24 through April 4, 2012, is a fascinating two-and-a-half-hour video that follows the recruitment, journey, and experience of 1,001 Chinese citizens chosen by Ai Weiwei to travel with him to Kassel, Germany, for Fairytale, his 2007 piece for Documenta 12. Most of the participants had never traveled abroad, and the group included a contingent from a poor rural area where, as Ai explains in the video, women are not even given names. Interspersed throughout the film are striking views of the Chinese and German countryside, troubling conversations among frustrated Chinese artists and intellectuals, and glimpses of tourist life in Kassel.
Living as Form (The Nomadic Version), 2012; installation view,Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco. Courtesy of the Kadist Art Foundation.
Suzanne Lacy/TEAM. The Roof Is On Fire, 1994 (performance still); 120:00. Courtesy of Suzanne Lacy.
Local relevance is crucial to the exhibition’s premise, and Linden is taking several steps to connect the show to the rich history of social practice in Northern California. On April 21, the Bay Area artists Chris Johnson and Amanda Eicher, along with high school students, will discuss The Roof Is On Fire, the video featured in the screening room from April 21 through April 28,and Question Bridge: Black Males, currently on view at the Oakland Museum of California. Organized by Suzanne Lacy, Johnson, and Annice Jacoby in 1994, The Roof Is On Fire was a potent performance piece in which two hundred twenty high school students sat in one hundred cars on a rooftop in Oakland and talked about relevant social issues. The audience was invited to stand near the cars and listen to the conversations, and the event was also videotaped and shown on the local NBC-affiliate station, CNN, and other news programs nationwide. By introducing current high school students to the work and allowing a contemporary audience to listen to the perspectives within, Linden underscores the work’s continuing significance as an influence on a younger generation of community-engaged artists in California, while generating new discussions about and from the project.
Because of the almost clandestine nature of Kadist’s San Francisco branch, with its subtle signage, unusual hours, and lack of marketing, Living as Form might be missed by the local audience but for those who stop to check out its window space. On the day I visited, Linden remarked that, while not many people had stepped inside the gallery that afternoon, between twenty and thirty curious passersby had paused by the front window to read about Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses, which concerns a vibrant Houston, Texas, community that combines contemporary art with subsidized housing for single mothers. The under-the-radar nature of the San Francisco venue of Living as Form (The Nomadic Version) speaks to a larger problem regarding the display of public-practice works after the fact, as contemporary curators continue to grapple with presenting that which is largely ephemeral. With this dilemma in mind, Kadist has commissioned two video interviews: with Fernando García Dory about his project, A World Gathering of Nomadic Peoples (2005–07), which convenes pastoralists from two hundred international communities, and with Theaster Gates, concerning his ongoing Dorchester Project, which includes the redesign of an abandoned Chicago building as a library, slide archive, and soul food kitchen. These videos and Creative Time’s Living as Form website represent steps toward archiving projects in the public realm for future generations and presenting new methods and forms of exhibition. Additionally, perhaps Kadist’s window display combined with public events will galvanize people into entering the space and interacting—whether perusing the archive or conversing with Linden—and will make the “connection between art and the fabric of people’s lives” that Ai describes as the modest goal of his grand project Fairytale. It is a goal that Living as Form also attempts to realize, on equally ambitious terms.
Living as Form (The Nomadic Version) is currently on view at the Kadist Art Foundation, in San Francisco, through May 12, 2012.
Thumbnail: Love and Loss in the Milky Way, 2005; table with forty-seven milk glass elements, plaster bust, plaster head, standing woman, ceramic cookie jar; 77 ¾ x 92 x 43 7/8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.
In his current exhibition at the Rena Bransten Gallery, Fred Wilson explores the idea that Black is not only beautiful but also philosophical. Wilson is an expert at producing conjunctions of historical objects that expose the racist undertones in the history of art and in material culture. It could be said that no artist has done more than he to bring the dynamics of identity politics into art and history museums throughout the United States and abroad. Wilson’s installations earned him a powerful reputation in the art world during the 1990s and a MacArthur “genius” award in 1999. After twenty years, one might wonder whether his conceptual language has evolved in the ensuing decades. This exhibition presents an artist comfortable with his métier but also one whose approach has expanded beyond the disruption of institutional cultures to include signaling the limits of representing blackness through material culture.
Wilson’s work has been something of a sensation since his project, Mining the Museum, co-organized by The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, opened at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992. Combining objects from the society’s collection that normally were not seen together into the same vitrine, such as silver coffee-service sets and slave manacles, Wilson launched an understated and irreverent attack upon the racial blind spots of American history. In the Whitney Museum’s Black Male exhibition in 1994, Wilson’s Guarded View (1991)—a group of four headless black mannequins wearing the guard uniforms of various New York City museums—greeted visitors to the exhibition. The work seemed to say: “If you are looking for the representation of African Americans at a canonical museum of American art, look no further than the security staff.”1 More exhibitions followed at art museums around the country, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Wilson was given a mid-career retrospective and selected to represent the United States at the 2003 Venice Biennale.
Untitled (Zadib, Sokoto, Samori, Veneto, Zanzibar, Dhaka, Macao), 2011; illuminated acrylic painted plastic globe, tassels, steel armature, plaster figure, and powder coated aluminum plate; 28 x 20 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.
Me and It, 1995; video installation with ceramic figures on table; 57 x 92 x 44 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.
While in Venice, Wilson began working with Murano glassmakers to produce original works in glass; one of these, Goin’ Places (2003), is on view at the Rena Bransten Gallery. This two-part work is composed of a candlestick in the form of a headless figure with black arms and a separate black head with golden hair. The prototype for this work can be found in eighteenth-century blackamoor figures, but Wilson removed the head from the figure and enlarged it, as if the head had expanded beyond its prior confines. Moorish figures such as these are a staple among decorative arts boutiques in Europe just as black jockey figures have long been a common sight in the American South. These days, Wilson is still in the business of repurposing discovered objects in order to set up his classic juxtapositions but with somewhat different aims. Untitled (Zadib, Sokoto, Samori, Veneto, Zanzibar, Dhaka, Macao) (2011), for example, features a plaster blackamoor figure holding aloft an illuminated globe that Wilson has painted black and given black tassels. This chintzy decorative object has been altered to reveal its underlying ugliness. The title gives a clue to the meaning of the tassels; each one marks a location of the Muslim slave trade during the Moorish domination of the Mediterranean basin. The historical object in this case is transformed so that the stylized Moorish servant reveals a history of black dominion and the subordination of others.
One can perceive a new turn in Wilson’s work by comparing two tabletop works on view: Me and It (1995), which Rena Bransten originally presented in 1995, and a more recent work, Love and Loss in the Milky Way (2005). Me and It consists of two video monitors placed on a wide table, on either side of a selection of ceramic vessels depicting stereotyped black figures (think Aunt Jemima) in various poses. In the video, Wilson attempts to replicate the poses of each of these figures while dressed in a similar manner. This presentation of the power of racial imagery and typology that circulates in popular culture demonstrates not only the absurdity of black stereotypes but also the violence they enact upon black individuals.
By contrast, Love and Loss in the Milky Way is a subtle and moving assemblage that reflects on the fragility of human relations. Here, seventy-five pieces of milk glass—one of which belonged to Wilson’s late mother—are displayed on a tabletop. Among these vessels are four sculptural elements: a standing Greek figure, the bust of a black woman with an elongated neck, a mammy-type figurative cookie jar, and a broken plaster bust of a white male, modeled on a classical Roman prototype. The work suggests an encounter between various cultures and alludes to the relationship between fine art and material culture. Yet the figures here are not just true to type. The way in which they face one another, with the white male figure lying broken among them, suggests a more philosophical response than one expects from Wilson. No longer does the artist attempt to embody one of these representations. Instead, he approaches his subject from a distance; viewers may sense that the real story lies among these pieces, in the gaps between races, ideas about race, and the way those are fixed in objects.
Fred Wilson will be on view at Rena Bransten Gallery, in San Francisco, through March 31, 2012.
________ NOTES:
1. Signaling the correction of this condition, Wilson has served as a member of the Whitney’s Board of Trustees since 2008.
Anna Sew Hoy’s Tissues and Trench Coats presents two different bodies of work: cut trench coats and ceramic tissue-box covers. With these sculptures, Sew Hoy attempts to poetically reframe everyday objects. Unfortunately, the results exhibit some questionable decisions on Sew Hoy’s part in regard to her choice of materials as well as the pieces’ restrained scale that prevents them from becoming transformative.
Much of the exhibition is dedicated to Sew Hoy’s reworked trench coats, which hang in an uncluttered arrangement. Sew Hoy has cut out most of the coats’ fabric, leaving only networks of seams that outline their structures along with their buttons. These skeletons hang on crude ceramic hangers, suspended by odd finger-shaped resin hooks attached to the gallery walls. Although they offer a smart way to solve installation logistics, Sew Hoy’s handmade hooks and hangers are distracting; the finger-shaped hooks, in particular, give the otherwise ghostly pieces an injection of the figurative that comes off as a goofy, surreal joke. Had Sew Hoy chosen nondescript hangers and hooks, she would have kept the viewer’s attention on the process the coats were subjected to and the banality of her chosen objects.
Sew Hoy’s cuts reference the coats’ construction (cut and sewn fabric panels) and attempt to convey a conceptually complex process of making and unmaking. Implicit to her approach is the idea that by breaking down an object, one can distill its essence. With this method, individual parts may become strange or unfamiliar once extracted from their original tidy form and function. While Sew Hoy has eradicated the purpose of her trench coats (they are no longer able to cover or protect one’s body), the resulting sculptures are affectively flat, evoking neither the sense of vulnerability nor absence one might expect them to. Gravity forces the horizontal seams of the coats to slightly sag while the vertical ones dangle their lengths, but the resulting shapes are not entirely unexpected. I suspect that Sew Hoy may have imagined results of more organic or chaotic forms but that the coats did not have the amount of detail in their original construction for her approach to achieve this.
beige/tan (detail), 2012; fired stoneware, trench coat, and resin finger hook, 62.5 x 17 x 4 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery.
Tissue dispensing (single) (detail), 2012; fired stoneware and powder coated steel, 48 x 11.5 x 12 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery.
In addition to her subtractive cutting method, Sew Hoy pursues a further process of distillation through seriality by presenting five coats within a modest range of color and style. A series potentially confirms or contrasts an object against its ideal or sets up comparisons between the particular objects themselves. With simple titles like rouge/tan, maroon/bleu lavande, and so on, Sew Hoy suggests she is interested in developing a formal range rather than a specific narrative about the individual coats—such as where they came from, who owned them, and when they were produced. But the limited number on display turns them into rarified art works rather than a cumulative commentary on the mass-produced object.
In contrast to the coats, the white ceramic tissue-box covers with their red steel stands have a more sculptural feel and futuristic look; a single tissue emerges from the top of each. With their combination of materials, textures, and colors, the tissue boxes are formally compelling. However, the relevance of the materials is perplexing. Tissue-box covers are typically constructed from crafty materials less prone to breaking—like lace, needlepoint, metal, and wood, but Sew Hoy’s sleek forms aim to avoid being anything tchotchke-like. While ceramic is a departure from the predictable, Sew Hoy could have opted for materials that may have achieved more evocative results, such as plaster or cast glass, which would provide the tissue boxes with a different sense of mass, fragility, and inversion that ceramic does. Sew Hoy’s selection of ceramic seems more a decision based on her having a repertoire with the medium than selecting a material that contributes complexity to the work. Additionally, I wonder if my opinions of the work are a result of the specific objects she’s chosen. With their air of suburban middle-class propriety, trench coats and tissue-box covers represent rather staid means of being discreet or covering something up.
The logic behind Sew Hoy’s processes may be sound, but unfortunately the poetic sense of deconstruction or reconstruction she may hope to convey might get lost in translation. By remaking everyday objects through unmaking them, Sew Hoy displays her artistic range while raising familiar questions about the intersection of mass production and artistic fabrication that have been asked since the presentation of the readymade. For all their minimal solemnity, Sew Hoy’s trench coats and tissue boxes fail to propose a new line of inquiry worthy of the frustrating level of scrutiny they demand of viewers.
Tissues and Trench Coats is on view at Romer Young Gallery, in San Francisco, through March 17, 2012.
In April 1964, a nomadic, twenty-three-year-old Arthur Tress moved to San Francisco, after previous travels in Mexico, to visit his sister and continue his art practice in photography and painting. Shortly after his arrival, he wrote to his father and brother—his sources of income at the time—with this observation: “The city itself and especially Oakland is very clean and monotonous.”1 Despite the turbulent political and cultural climate of San Francisco at this time—civil rights activists protesting on Auto Row in April, and the Beatles and the Republican National Convention coming to town in July and August, respectively—similar sentiments were separately conveyed by Hunter S. Thompson who, when bemoaning the flight of the beatniks to New York City, wrote, “Life is more peaceful in San Francisco, but infinitely duller.”2
During the short time Tress spent photographing San Francisco in the spring and summer of 1964, he amassed more than nine hundred negatives, from which curator James A. Ganz has selected seventy-one for the exhibition Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964. The selection focuses on San Franciscans in an environment dominated by political rallies, signage (both commercial and political), and architecture. As emphasized by the exhibit’s title, these images present San Francisco and its people in a specific time and place: a baby sits in a stroller in Union Square with a “Goldwater For President” button pinned to her bonnet; a business man at City Hall clutches a daily paper with the headline, “Murder in the Park”; a woman rests in a self-service laundromat, the walls of which are emblazoned with classic ’60s typefaces. But the ways in which Tress plays off of and pairs these details make these photographs historically insightful while uniquely his own.
Arthur Tress, Untitled (Van Ness at Geary Boulevard), 1964. Courtesy of the de Young Museum, San Francisco.
Arthur Tress, Untitled (Union Square), 1964. Courtesy of the de Young Museum, San Francisco.
Tress’s and Thompson’s observations about a tedious San Francisco resonate most in the faces and postures of the people in these photographs, the vast majority of which either look devastatingly bored or severely pensive. The aforementioned lady in the laundromat, for example, appears not to be waiting for her wash but for initiative; the businessman at City Hall and the Goldwater baby share the same look of deep contemplation, a distant beyond-the-frame stare that is disturbing in its severity. Indeed, very few of Tress’s subjects—aside from clowns with painted smiles and politicians’ grinning heads on campaign posters—are smiling. Ennui seems to be a constant. As a respite, Tress injects humor into many of his compositions, using repetition, perspective shifts, and juxtapositions to help lighten the mood. In one hilarious photo, two teenage girls at a Beatles fan club rally stand beneath their homemade “Ringo for President” sign, their faces ecstatically wrenched in contrast to the hand-drawn image of Ringo, who looks hopelessly depressed.
Such contextual playfulness—a quality of Tress’s work throughout his career—pushes these otherwise mundane scenes into a new light through combinatorial shifts of subtle details. In one photo, due to a flattened perspective, a young girl sitting on a window ledge appears to be resting her dangling feet on a businessman’s pompadour. In another, Tress captures the lovely repetition of the word Cadillac on a sun-glared storefront window, in front of which stands an African American man in a suit, casting a glare of his own. Tress’s attention to what the surrounding environment suggests helps elide any overwrought socio-political interpretations that these images’ historic context might imply. There’s also the pairing and juxtaposition of people with various objects (mannequin head, gas pump, tricycle) and commercial signage that pushes one’s attention to the surface, so that the shared stoic stares of a mannequin and a woman lose their emotive weight in the face of the formal features that surround them. Children provide another reprieve from the tension found in these scenes. Tress’s photos break the monotony and provide a fuller view into the lives of everyday San Franciscans: a panorama that takes in the banal with the beautiful and the dull with the remarkable.
Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964 is on view at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, through June 3, 2012.
________ NOTES:
1. From a letter from Arthur Tress to his father and brother, in James A. Ganz, Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964 (London: Prestel, 2012), 6.
2. Hunter S. Thompson, “When the Beatniks Were Social Lions,” National Observer, April 20, 1964.
Thumbnail: Afterimage, 2012; installation view. 1,234 Days (Sunspots), 2012; digital video, looped; one foot diameter. Courtesy of the Artist and MacArthur B Arthur, Oakland.
On March 6, 2012, NASA announced the eruption of two huge solar flares from the surface of our sun. These flares sent accompanying coronal mass ejections (balloon-shaped bursts of solar wind) traveling towards Earth at more than one thousand miles per second, threatening to collide with our planet in the form of a geomagnetic storm. While this news spawned a hyperbolic media frenzy filled with fears of knocked-out power grids, disrupted GPS, and downed airlines, the actual effects of this space weather were next to nothing. Residents of Iceland witnessed a lovely aurora borealis.
Nevertheless, we are currently in the midst of an increase in solar activity, part of a normal eleven-year solar cycle expected to peak in late 2013.1 As that apex approaches, only one or two storms will likely be strong enough to be labeled extreme. In those cases, however, our dependency on electronics will be cause for worry. According to Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, intense solar storms pose health risks for astronauts, can destroy the sensitive electronics on orbiting satellites, and can overload electric grids on Earth. “Without warning,” he writes, “millions of people might be plunged into darkness.”2
This uptick in solar activity and the resulting fear serves as a reminder that the sun is not a benign and benevolent spot of light in the sky but a gigantic, incredibly hot star that we are only just beginning to understand. Currently, NASA maintains a vast and growing archive of sun data gathered through the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), and centuries of philosophical speculation on the nature of the sun, light, and perception existed prior to today’s imaging and measurements. Hillary Wiedemann mines both pools of knowledge as inspiration for her new solo show, Afterimage, at MacArthur B Arthur Gallery in Oakland.
For Wiedemann, the sun is both subject and source material. Six separate pieces fill the project space with an assortment of tactile, visual, and aural experiences that use the sun as “a marker of time, a source of light, a determiner of place, and through its absence, an acute awareness of space.”3 Using the phenomenological concerns of the Light and Space movement as a starting point, Wiedemann’s exhibit explores the transparent and reflective qualities of different materials. But by linking each piece specifically to the sun, instead of relying on abstract shapes to convey sensory phenomena, the exhibit becomes a familiar and revelatory experience for the viewer rather than a disorienting one.
(from left to right) Sun Shadow, 2012 (still); three-channel digital video projection, looped; 72 in. diameter. Gray Area, 2012; reflective fabric; 36 x 36 in. Untitled (for Goethe), 2012; glass microspheres, paint, vinyl tiles; approximately 300 sq. ft. Courtesy of the Artist and MacArthur B Arthur, Oakland.
Sun Shadow, 2012; three-channel digital video projection, looped; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and MacArthur B Arthur, Oakland.
This is especially the case where light and shadow come into play. In Untitled (for Goethe) (2012), three hundred vinyl floor tiles are covered with white paint and glass microspheres, the same material used to create reflective lines on city roads. This surface treatment yields a highly satisfying sound as viewers walk through the show. From certain angles, the white tiles are just white tiles, but with the light shining from behind, they become spectacularly reflective—and suddenly a spotlight of silver surrounds a viewer’s shadow.
This participatory effect is furthered in Sun Shadow (2012), a six-foot-wide three-channel projection of red, green, and blue light. Using still images from an “extreme ultraviolet imaging telescope,” Wiedemann animated 1,234 days worth of three different temperature readings from the sun’s surface. As the projected image of the sun jerkily turns, with flares popping up and dissipating, viewers standing between the projectors and the wall create a set of multicolored shadows that resemble aura photography. Sun Shadow is greatly removed from the visible sun, yet the piece amplifies its subject’s qualities through the participatory demonstration of how different wavelengths of light combine to form color. Repeatedly in this exhibit, Wiedemann takes scientific data, renders it useless to science, and creates works that emphasize the sensory residue the sun leaves behind. Instead of the actual image, she provides us with the afterimage, or, in one case, no image at all.
For 8 minutes, 18 seconds (2012), Wiedemann sampled acoustic waves used by helioseismologists to study the core and far side of the sun. Unseen, “the body of the sun is literally roaring with turbulent boiling motions” measured through these waves.4 The piece is in a darkened, closet-size room at the front of the gallery. Sped up and edited, the audio brings to mind recordings of whale songs or what the Voyager Golden Record might sound like when it reaches alien ears. Capturing this invisible activity and replaying it in darkness, Wiedemann guides the audience into an appreciation of the sun’s hidden powers.
While some works contain nods to the constraints of conceptual art (1,234 days represents the exact amount of time Wiedemann has been in San Francisco; light from the sun takes eight minutes and eighteen seconds to reach Earth), other pieces evince an interest in unique materials that contain and refract light. In concert, the works form a highly considered and meticulously crafted solo show. The only setback for this inventive and accomplished work is an obvious one: with so many pieces relying on precise levels of illumination, Afterimage is best seen after its subject has set. Thankfully, the gallery has expanded its hours to include nighttime viewings on Wednesday evenings from 7 to 9 p.m., encouraging more comprehensive exploration of Wiedemann’s experiments into the phenomenology of perception.
Afterimage is on view at MacArthur B Arthur, in Oakland, through April 1, 2012.
I love the ABBA song “Waterloo” for a lot of reasons, but one of its greatest virtues is how beautifully it demonstrates an artist’s ability to appropriate historical catastrophe in order to express the most present, quotidian pain. The 158 years that separated the Battle of Waterloo and the writing of “Waterloo” were obviously sufficient to enable an innocuous appropriation in pop music. And yet, the song emerged in a precarious social context: “Waterloo” was a top-ten hit in the United States in 1974, when the U.S. was about to surrender in its imperialist war effort in Southeast Asia. So ABBA’s intervention is not only a bit of play with a historical signifier (Waterloo), translated from the martial to the erotic, it also proposes a new model for considering art and history.
More Paintings announces its intention. The show is profoundly aboutpainting in a number of senses. One tactilely feels the commitment on the part of the three artists—Erin Allen, Keith Boadwee, and Isaac Gray, who paint under the moniker, Club Paint—upon viewing the paintings, which vary from one another as much in color and depth as in affect. Primarily the works show a deep relationship with the tradition of Western painting, even as they approach that tradition with a risky level of irreverence.
The signifiers that Club Paint appropriate from the history of painting in More Paintings are not entirely classical. Alongside the many iterations of the nude and the still life (La Brea Tar Pits, 2011),modern and postmodern forms are cited explicitly (“action painting” in Vienna Action,2011)and suggestively (1980s figure painting in Relational Aesthetics, 2011).Club Paint’s commitment to the tradition of painting is total, including not only the splendors but also the nightmares of Western painting. The works could easily be read as ferociously misogynist, racist, or brutally irresponsible in a time of worldwide political turbulence. And, like the Nordic shock of “Waterloo,” Club Paint’s response to these problems seems to be the provocative and slippery proposition that absolute irreverence is a viable intervention of the conventional engagement with tradition and history.
The ambiguity of this engagement is keyed by the very first painting hanging in the gallery: the brilliant French Revolution (2011).In this work,a poodle drags what appears to be a painting in its jaws, ripping apart the tradition within an image that embodies it. The scribbled quality of the dog’s hair is a counterpoint to both the tradition of sharply rendered poodles that live inside the frames of European paintings and also to the creatures themselves, whose impeccable grooming has become
French Revolution, 2010; oil on canvas. Courtesy of Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco.
Conspiracy Theory, 2011; oil on canvas. Courtesy of Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco.
a cliché. French Revolution singularly performs what all of the paintings in More Paintings achieve in relation to canonical figurative representation: half bark, half bite.
Neither of these paintings approaches the sadistic racial violence of Conspiracy Theory (2011). This painting is difficult to encounter—in part because Conspiracy Theory, like much of the show, is not a straightforward representation of a familiar scene (even a scene of violence that has become familiar). The sex being depicted in Conspiracy Theory is too fucked-up to bear; it refuses to accept politically correct or responsible demands and instead places a new set of demands on its viewer. In this way, Conspiracy Theory is reminiscent of the terrible rape scene in Sam Peckinpah’s film, Straw Dogs (1971), a calculated and measured conflation of violence and masochistic pleasure that, finally, absolutely implicates the viewer who engages the image. The declaration of absolute irreverence as a form of redemption for such violence might not be sufficient for many viewers.
But not every painting in More Paintings provokes such discomfort. La Brea Tar Pits is a rich reiteration of the still-life tradition: on a placid canvas, a gentle (but menacing!) dinosaur rips into a basket of fruit. Emo Painting (2010)shows a skull atop a pillar contemplating its image in a mirror. The eye socket of its mirror image, however, squirts dark—and presumably woeful and fabulously pathetic—lines into the simulacral space. Just as this exhibition brings together the appalling and the hilarious in a shared system relating to the many pictorial gestures of canonical painting, it also shows a range of emotions.
Although Club Paint’s approach risks total irreverence—an irreverence that constitutes a disobedience to liberal political correctness and the whole tradition of Western painting—there are occasionally moments of old-fashioned sympathy and real tenderness in More Paintings.Nobody Loves You When You Are Old And Gay (2011), for instance, has a couple of beautifully cheap jokes, but there is a real loneliness in the composition and an all-too-human heart in what is, paradoxically, not obviously a human body.
There’s a real girl singing “Waterloo.” She’s just about to surrender to her libidinal urges. She doesn’t care about Napoleon, the Bourbon restoration, or the historical vicissitudes of Revanchist regime change. Her palette, like Club Paint’s, is vast enough to include almost everything—even what the three artist collaborators know all too well they should never show. Surrender to its logic or not; there’s no denying that More Paintings raises the stakes of painting.
More Paintings is on view at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, in San Francisco, through April 7, 2012.
Good stories take ordinary experiences and make them ecstatic and unfamiliar. They are products of imagination, the creators of new images despite everything seeable already existing.1 Though often considered an individual attribute, imagination is also collaborative, activated and verified by other people. The production of something mysterious relies on someone else to experience it as such. It hinges not only on another person’s ability to recognize a pattern in a set of signs, but also to invent new meaning. If imagination is a dependent capability, protecting the imaginations of others is a vital part of caring for oneself.
Warm in Winter
In 2007, I started to notice honeybees wobbling on my back stoop, disoriented and drained, uninterested in flowers. One would turn up every couple of weeks, stumbling in circles on the cement. I thought it might be a phenomenon unique to the microclimate just south of San Francisco’s Alamo Square Park; the clouds always broke over the hill, creating a warm patch of sky above the back door. Around the same time, worker bees all over the country were abandoning their hives, ignoring the flowers.
The first Haven (2011) hive sits atop a sixteen-foot-tall steel post anchored in a public park in Kansas City, Missouri. Jarett Mellenbruch undertook research to find a structure that would appeal to wild bees, one large enough to house a swarm but small enough to ensure that the bees would keep each other warm in winter. Three years later, he arrived at a box built from high-density polyethylene and wood, insulated like a hollow tree branch. His aim for Haven, which currently exists largely as a proposal, is to install one thousand of these elevated spaces in urban areas across the United States, challenging colony collapse and habitat loss by providing wild pollinators with new homes. In addition to making feral colonies available for study, the project also helps bees with their public relations. Mellenbruch’s structure looks like a birdhouse with an open gable roof, its white Corian exterior carved with false colonnades. A placard near the hive provides information about the bees, aping literature found in zoos and national parks. Quick Response (QR) codes on the plaques will link to more detail and to a page where visitors can offer up their observations of the hive.
When their hives get too crowded, bees relocate by sending out scouts. They collect information about a knot in a tree or a hole in a wall and return to convey this to the rest, wiggling a map that spells out where to find the site in relation to the sun. The intensity of a bee’s vibrations connotes its level of excitement, and each scout makes a case. Haven encourages this existing process by giving wild bees ideal places to dance about. It also uses the swarm as a metaphor for human activity; when enough hives are installed and the QR codes are in place, the project will create a network of amateur and expert beekeepers, park visitors, and ecologists. The project crowdsources on the bees’ behalf, mirroring the way they distribute responsibility to collect information. Years from now, the individual data points will accumulate into a narrative about wild pollinators, making it easier to monitor the health of the hive.
When You’re Strange
Members of the Charleens Cabaret Dance Troupe were covered in giant zits. At the end of their act the biggest one burst, hitting high school teens, severing their limbs, blasting open their bellies, and breaking their bones. Uniformed members of the National Guard emerged calmly from the wings and applied bandages and tourniquets. Children and parents in the audience of televised variety show Whoop Dee Doo cheered; lives had been saved.
Every episode of Whoop Dee Doo opens with a dance party. Children, drag queens, Christian mimes, and punk rockers dance together surrounded by tangled, bulging sets that many of them work together to build. The television show’s founders and hosts, Jaimie Warren and Matt Roche, respectively play a bubbly bag of movie popcorn and a flannel-wearing, introverted werewolf. They collaborate with existing acts in Kansas City and in cities where they are invited to perform, putting together groups that might not otherwise come into contact.2 For an episode taped at the Malmö Festivale in Sweden, they searched for a black-metal band to host a hugging contest. After they received a reproachful rejection letter from Denial of God, the band Pagan Rites agreed. Pairs of audience members shared the stage with the band, squeezing each other as the lead singer came unhinged. The hug-off was sandwiched between a performance by an award-winning troupe of Swedish folk dancers and a vegetable-eating contest for adults.
Whoop Dee Doo. Your Body Isn’t A Wonderland. It’s Gross, 2011 (still); variety show; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art TBA Festival, Portland, OR, September 17, 2011. Courtesy of Whoop Dee Doo, Kansas City.
Jarrett Mellenbruch. Deep Ecology Project: Haven beehive, 2011; wood, Corian/high density polyethylene, steel, and concrete; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.
The variety show format enables illogic; wildly different performances take place one after another, united by the show’s low-budget, over-the-top, public access aesthetic. But the strangest, most exciting moments happen when acts find ways to integrate: citizen soldiers rescue students walloped by a flapper’s exploding pimple. The groups that perform with Whoop Dee Doo often have their own audiences and identities. Like Irish step dancers, metal rockers abide by a set of existing standards that make them recognizable to their public. But when those two sets of conventions inhabit the same story, they become unclassifiable. The mini-narratives between acts create a kind of logic that makes them depend on one another.
Say It with Me
A mannequin selects a self-help VHS tape from the shelf at a thrift boutique: Essentially You’s Guide to Becoming a Better Person Through Clothing Choice. She pushes play. A wrinkled data entry specialist with abundant tangerine hair appears on screen and congratulates her on her purchase: “You made the right choice and I’m proud of you... Come over here. I saved a seat for you.” They suddenly share the same wallpaper. The specialist asks questions intended to assess the model’s mental state and guide her to a sense of purpose.
You Live Here Too (2011) is a live performance coupled with a split-screen video projection. Julia Vering, the artist who plays the mannequin, is also a social worker at Kansas City Presbyterian Manor, a nonprofit retirement home. The Essentially You specialists are residents there. While Vering scripted some of the lines, others are open-ended prompts that invite improvisation. She used her own character’s search for self to unify the stories told by the seniors, adding a layer of fiction to their already ethereal accounts. The project creates a space for imagination outside of the stigma associated with dementia and memory loss. Erosion gives way to construction: “We are making memories together. Say it with me: I am changing my strategy. I am changing my mind. I am changing my life. I am changing what I think about my friends.”
In You Live Here Too, no distinction exists between fantasy and remembered events. Memories are integrated into the surreal storyline, whether accurate or invented. While You Live Here Too reveals collaborative storytelling to be a generative activity, it also points to its soft spots. The guides scold Vering, telling her she can’t be trusted and that she hasn’t accomplished much. The mannequin’s search for someone essentially herself becomes futile with the realization that her identity is reliant on other people, subject to unstable plots and invented characterizations.
Every Third Bite
Bees are dying in part because their productive potential is understood. Factory bees are fed high-fructose corn syrup in the winter and shipped to pollinate single crops during the summer, reducing the variety of species they consume and help sustain. Haven protects the bees’ productivity by refusing to channel it through these familiar routes, creating a framework within which they can work to nourish themselves. Whoop Dee Do and Vering’s You Live Here Too similarly work to cultivate and protect the productive potential of others. They sustain imagination by inventing structures that can hold divergent visions while preventing those narratives from being easily categorized. The interdependence of communities has become a commonplace observation: bees touch one-third of the human food supply. These projects take the ordinary material of interconnection and make it strange—less easily understood and more apt to ignite.
________ NOTES:
1. This definition of the imagination is derived from Immanuel Kant’s account in The Critique of Judgement.
2. The current roster of Whoop Dee Do artists includes: Natalie Myers, Erin Zona, Lindsey Griffith, Roger Link, Megan Mantia, Stuart Scott Smith, Chris Beer, Lee Heinemann, Madeline Gallucci, Molly Ryan, Sarah Taylor, Shaun Teamer, Elizabeth Allen-Cannon, Brandon Nemeth, and Ryan Comiskey.
As its name implies, Subterranean Gallery is both literally and legally underground. Created, curated, and hosted by Ayla Rexroth since 2010, the gallery occupies the front space of her windowless basement apartment, along with an indoor hot tub that is the site for The Hot Tub Dialogues lecture series, co-curated by Subterranean’s other occupant, Clayton Skidmore. Small, low-ceilinged, and not exactly cozy, Subterranean Gallery is nonetheless an intriguing place to look at art, mostly because it never ceases to be an apartment. Rexroth has created an exhibition program in which the ways that visitors are invited to view and interact with the art often mimic and mirror domestic rituals. She frames the objects and activities on view at Subterranean in such a way not only to stimulate discussion around artistic practice but also to use her home as a site of resistance to institutional authority.
This resistance dates back to the gallery’s inception, when Rexroth curated an exhibition of work by a classmate as her senior thesis project at the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI). As a painting major whose work incorporated installation and furniture design, Rexroth regarded curating as, “step[ping] into a context that made a lot more sense.”1 Her professors did not, however, and even discouraged her classmates from attending the gallery. As Rexroth noted, “they drew the line” at her home as a site of production.2
That line remained perceptible in our conversation about the role the gallery has played in her transition from a student to a working artist. From her perspective, KCAI is a dominant force in the Kansas City art scene, but individual students have little visibility or exposure to the scene outside of it. One can understand Subterranean as reflective of Rexroth’s desire to create a place where an institutional identity will not subsume those of the individuals participating or affiliating with it. If the home is the site where social mores are ritualized and inscribed as part of one’s identity, it is also the place where one can reject socially prescribed behaviors or mandates. Subterranean takes advantage of this not-quite seamless collision; visitors are invited to behave as if they are operating in both a public sphere as viewers and a private domain as houseguests. Rexroth’s responsiveness to the domestic nature of her venue generates participatory action and conversations from its audience while conditioning its interactions with the work and with each other. She also serves brunch.
For example, Rexroth curated an exhibition in April 2011 entitled One Night Stand Exhibition & Morning After Critique. The participating artists, Jane Sheldon and S. Clifford Proski, slept over after the opening; the following morning, thirty invited guests critiqued the work while enjoying quiche and coffee. The critique format resembled the one Rexroth and Skidmore had encountered as part of their education at KCAI. But because the setting was transposed to the apartment and implied a level of intimacy not normally associated with viewing art, the vulnerability of the artist as the subject of such a discussion could be both acknowledged and diminished.
In part, the domestic nature of the space is foregrounded because the gallery cannot legally function as such; areas zoned for residential use in Kansas City lack the designation to engage in the production or sale of art. Rexroth doesn’t receive commissions from any sales, and Subterranean is currently the only gallery of its kind in Kansas City. Rexroth takes advantage of her singularity to propose a curatorial model that emphasizes both the risks that one can take and the leisure that one seeks to have at home. Circumventing the zoning restrictions through the absence of sales, the gallery foregrounds other forms of exchange, such as dialogue.
Paul Shortt. Mirrored Pillory, 2011; installation view, Subterranean Gallery. Courtesy of Subterranean Gallery, Kansas City, MO.
Audience members, Hot Tub Dialogues,February 18, 2012; Subterranean Gallery. Courtesy of Subterranean Gallery, Kansas City, MO.
Throughout February 2011, Rexroth and Skidmore hosted three lectures in the hot tub located between the gallery and the kitchen. Fueled by funds generated from a Kickstarter campaign, the Hot Tub Dialogues was a series of frank and casual discussions between established members of the Kansas City art community. The guest speakers included, among others: Hesse McGraw, the chief curator at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska; Raechell Smith, the chief curator of the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute; and Kate Hackman, the codirector of the Charlotte Street Foundation. They donned bathing suits and bathrobes and spoke from the tub to small audiences of about thirty people. In asking respected individuals who hold prominent institutional roles to strip down and chill out, Skidmore and Rexroth aspired to create a sense of intimacy and access between those in positions of power or influence and artists at the early stages of their careers. Smith, who hung out in the hot tub with Hackman on February 18, noted that they mitigated the awkwardness of the scenario by conducting their conversation as if it was just the two of them there, “benignly ignoring” the audience’s presence.3
Yet, despite Hackman’s characterization of the conversation as “totally relaxing,” the presence of an audience reintroduces a tension between personal gesture and public engagement, a common dynamic in Subterranean’s programming given the performative qualities domestic rituals and incidental actions take on in the context of the gallery.4 A recent exhibition, How To Do Something, All Alone, By Yourself, with work by Robert Chase Heishman and Paul Shortt, exemplified this transitional space where one’s behavior intersects with performing one’s identity. In his work, Heishman tries to find communion with his purported namesake, an actor and character from the 1980s TV series Falcon Crest. Shortt’s sculptures veer between interactivity and punishment: participants stand in mirrored stockades or in the corner of the gallery in a kind of time-out. The exhibition echoes the intentions of the gallery to use the space of the home to identify where one conforms to external mandates (and discipline) and where one can push beyond prescribed limits to arrive at a sense of self-determination.
Subterranean’s participatory nature is not dependent on the sanction of bureaucracy or institutional power structures. Instead, it offers a perceptual model that is responsive to both the circumstances and intentions of the gallery but is irreducible to either through its continual emphasis on the performance of domestic rituals. As both houseguests and viewers, visitors to Subterranean evaluate their own activities as private individuals contributing to a larger communal structure, a domicile both staged and occupied where invitation cohabits with resistance.
________ NOTES:
1. Ayla Rexroth, in conversation at Subterranean Gallery, February 4, 2012.
2. Ibid.
3. Raechell Smith, email message to author, February 27, 2012.
4. Kate Hackman, email message to author, February 27, 2012.
Driving into Kansas City from the airport, one observes nothing but gently undulating prairie for miles. The historic downtown brick buildings are beautiful as they appear on the horizon, especially if you happen to arrive in the late afternoon glow of the setting sun. Kansas City is massive, encompassing more than three hundred sprawling square miles. Beyond scale, the sociopolitical geography also poses obstacles for visitors; as with so much of the American landscape, an embedded history of racial disparity defines unspoken boundaries within and around the city, the contours of which are recognized only within the community. Understanding historically freighted terrain is a sensitive process, garnered through a familiarity that comes with time; as a visitor, what kind of observations can be made? Through their work, several Kansas City artists critically address the local history and generate dialogue about it. This article offers a glimpse into the ways that artists speak through local activity to the larger picture.
Among locals, Troost Avenue is psychologically loaded, a historical division that bisects the community geographically and racially. Troost Avenue’s significance in this regard can be traced as far back as the 1700s, to the displacement of the Osage Nation whose former canoe trail is delineated by its path; in the early 1800s, the area east of Troost Avenue was populated by a 365-acre slave plantation owned by the Kansas City founding father and Dutchman Dr. Benoist Troost.1 A heritage of inequality is deeply rooted in this land—today the area is home to a predominantly underserved and impoverished non-white community and is rife with blighted houses. A number of artists throughout the city address this glaring divide.
Following a recent panel discussion on public art and community at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, A. Bitterman—a pseudonym of the artist Peter Cowdin—prepared an unsolicited proposal-cum-artwork for the museum. Presented as a series of touristic postcards, the work was intended to incite institutional dialogue about the unspoken parameters of community. Bitterman’s City of Fountains (2011) proposes the transplant of a condemned house from the area east of Troost to the nearby museum’s lawn, to exist alongside signature sculptures such as Shuttlecocks (1994), by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.2 In exchange, Bitterman posits, Sheep Piece (1971–72), one of the museum’s thirteen iconic bronze Henry Moore sculptures, could be placed in the house’s vacated lot, two miles away. Though it received a perfunctory rejection from the museum, the proposal found enthusiasm elsewhere. Many people identified with the powerful implications of giving voice to the racial and economic division of the city. “It’s not a secret here, but nobody really talks about it,” says Bitterman, who readily acknowledges that his status as a white artist from a comfortable suburb complicates his critical position. “It’s the elephant in the room, civically speaking.”3
Warner Studio Collection. Courtesy of the Kansas City Museum and Union Station, Kansas City, MO.
A. Bitterman. City of Fountains, 2011; postcard. Courtesy of the Artist.
Caitlin Horsmon also mines regional history to generate dialogue-driven work. Her web-based project in development, Resistant Histories (2012), repositions histories of oppression as histories of resistance by examining regional activists of the past. Presented as online films and media, the project includes walking tours of historic sites, designed for mobile devices. Horsmon, who teaches in the departments of Film and Media Arts and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, is also working with her students to create short documentaries.4 The subject of Horsmon’s current documentary is Corinthian Nutter, an African American schoolteacher of the 1940s, who advocated for and saw the racial integration of Kansas City schools five years in advance of the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Beyond creating an archive of local history—there is very little online information about Nutter, despite the fact that her family name is memorialized around Kansas City—the website will also share research documents and provide teaching guides. Horsmon’s project aims to empower her students by demonstrating that the effects of seemingly small gestures make up a larger history.
Every act of resistance begins with someone expressing inequality, sometimes quietly. After viewing a 2006 exhibition of mid-twentieth-century photographs presented by the Kansas City Museum, the local artist and writer José Faus remarked in the comment book: “This is a very interesting show, but I don’t see myself here.”5 He was struck by the exhibition’s failure to represent the city’s diverse communities; a pervasively white presence dominated hundreds of images. In response to this blind spot, the museum recently began a series of initiatives to redefine an institution that “for years eschewed interest in [anything] other than the dominant cultural history,” according to the museum’s director, Christopher Leitch.6 One of the initiatives, the Nuestra Herencia project—Faus is a member of the community advisory council—aims to collect artifacts from Hispanic and Latino/a communities throughout Kansas City’s history.7 Faus notes that there are further plans to initiate an oral history project with the Latino Writers Collective that will engage younger community members in historicizing cultural memory. These are radical gestures in redefining the dominant culture locally, with the potential to cause untold effects elsewhere. “It’s not just Troost,” noted Faus. “It’s a mental division that exists—how do we break these walls down? It’s incumbent on artists to do it.”8
“Deciding that we are in fact accountable frees us to act,” writes the artist and historian Aurora Levins Morales in her essay “Racism: Rootedness as Spiritual and Political Practice.”9 Levins Morales traces a personal genealogy associated with slaveholders and discusses the complications of confronting racism from within its reaches. Accepting a challenging lineage, she asserts, creates progress. As evidenced by a number of all too brief Kansas City encounters, many of the city’s artists have found quietly proactive, nonaggressive ways to confront a history of racial disparity and, in doing so, to build community. Each of these artists implements simple strategies to engender dialogue about how the past is implicated in the present. Most importantly, their work invests younger artists with a responsibility to carry the conversation into the future.
________ NOTES:
1. The earliest documented settlers of the area were French fur traders in the early 1700s, who allied with the indigenous Osage Nation against Spanish settlers. In the 1800s, following the Louisiana Purchase and dubious treaties with the United States government, the Osage were pitted against the Cherokees, among other tribes, in duplicitous promises for the same land. By 1825, the Osage ceded all traditional lands in Missouri as well as Arkansas and Oklahoma. Sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osage_Nation (February 17, 2012); additional information sourced from http://www.slideshare.net/ReconciliationServices/brief-history-of-troost-avenue (February 17, 2012).
2. Bitterman takes his title from the Kansas City tourism slogan that touts the more than two hundred fountains located around the city.
3. A. Bitterman, email to author, February 16, 2012.
4. The website (http://www.resistanthistories.org) will launch in May 2012. There are five completed films thus far. To date, the completed Kansas City neighborhood walking tours include Downtown Overland Park, Bannister Mall, Independence, the East Side of Kansas City, the Crossroads, Hyde Park and North Hyde Park.
5. The Photographer’s Eye featured more than two hundred images of Kansas City from the 1950s and early 1960s, all taken by Warner Studio.
6. Christopher Leitch, email to author, February 18, 2012.
7. Another initiative, the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America (GLAMA), is organized in partnership with University of Missouri–Kansas City and contains a collection of AIDS Walk T-shirts, among other ephemera.
8. José Faus, in a telephone conversation with the author, February 15, 2012.
9. Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998), 76.
Making a pitch for a microgrant at one of BREAD! KC’s monthly dinners can be a scary proposition. The project idea that made such sense in the studio is now a PowerPoint presentation for a group of relative strangers from the Kansas City area, who assess its worthiness for funding.
Begun by two art-school friends, Sean Starowitz and Andy Erdrich, BREAD! KC has held fourteen dinners and distributed more than $5,000 since its first event in October 2010, averaging about $400 in donations per dinner (although the past few dinners have each raised much more). The program is one of fifty-six independent global affiliates of Sunday Soup—a food-based microfunding network initiated by the Chicago-based arts funding research group InCubate—which was founded on the idea that communities needn’t rely upon governmental support where funding has diminished. While Sunday Soup is not without precedent (the San Francisco artist Josh Greene, for example, used tips from his job as a server at an upscale restaurant to fund projects), it has been a particularly effective fundraising model, having raised more than $55,000 for projects, as of this writing.1 This has been especially true in the case of art communities like Kansas City that are far from major urban centers; the majority of Sunday Soup grant recipients are concentrated in the Midwest.
Sunday Soup’s model encourages keeping operations inexpensive and simple, allowing for the widest possible participation of both artists and diners. In the case of BREAD! KC, donations produce all aspects of the meals. The ten-dollar entrance fee for a ballot and dinner encourages demographic diversity and draws new participants each month. RSVPs are required to ensure that the monthly average attendance of forty to seventy participants remains steady. Each event takes place in a new location, which allows shifts in design, concept, and presentation of the meals. Small local businesses have donated wine, artisanal bread, and organic produce; for BREAD! KC’s first event, Julia Cole, the program coordinator of the Rocket Grants program and a friend of the project, donated vessels and dinnerware. BREAD! KC even collaborated with the ceramicist Roberto Lugo to make an edition of bowls and cups especially for one meal.2
In its most organic form, microfunding stems from the needs of the community it serves. As Starowitz notes, “I think now, more than ever, is the time to look at more models and approaches and reevaluate what works and what doesn’t. BREAD! KC is a great microexample of the whole arts issue in KC.… Maybe we should fund the art we want to see, with our own efforts.”3
BREAD! KC co-founder Andy Erdrich (lower right) serves diners and potential funders at a BREAD! KC dinner at Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange, Kansas City, MO, January 2012. Courtesy of BREAD! KC. Photo: Paul M. Ingold.
Tables set for a BREAD! KC brown-bag dinner held at the Kansas City Art Institute on October 16, 2011. Courtesy of BREAD! KC. Photo: Paul M. Ingold.
BREAD! KC is one of many granting options in the Kansas City area. Others include Inspiration Grants from the Arts Council, Money for Artists Promotion (M.A.P.) and Lighton grants from the Kansas City Artists Coalition, and Charlotte Street Foundation’s Rocket Grants and awards for visual and generative performing artists. With all these options, there are many artists in the area who still need funding. BREAD! KC does not appear to present a conflict of interest with these other funders, and its portable and flexible model speaks to the need for smaller instant grants that are easily accessed by the public. Diane Scott, program manager for Artist INC, a collaborative partnership of the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City, Charlotte Street Foundation, and the University of Missouri–Kansas City Innovation Center, says: “I feel as though BREAD! KC is filling a hole in the grants market in Kansas City and that [it is] indicative of the DIY and collaborative attitudes among artists [here].”
BREAD! KC plays an important role as an initial funder for many Kansas City artists: it provides them the opportunity to see firsthand their projects’ impressions on potential funders and to subsequently enhance their projects’ attractiveness to larger future grantors. Erdrich likens the dinners to “a very real competition.” “With BREAD! KC,” he says, “you are actually in the ring.” The dinner guests expect the applicants to be prepared to discuss their intentions and to have a clear understanding of their proposed projects.
Nicholas Naughton, co-owner and operator of La Cucaracha Press in Kansas City, is one example of an artist who jump-started a project with a small amount of money. He received $360 from BREAD! KC in the spring of 2011 to begin a letterpress venture with a couple of partners. In an email message, Naughton wrote: “The print studio has quickly become my whole life…. We’ve already begun planning the next three years.” For the most part, recipients like Naughton have been transparent with how the funds are used. BREAD! KC asks previous recipients to share their progress at each event, which offers accountability and reassurance about the process to donors.
BREAD! KC’s challenge for the future is to appeal to a broader swath of applicants and donors by seeking and highlighting projects that represent the city’s racial and socioeconomic diversity. Part of the issue lies in Kansas City’s sprawling geography, its corresponding lack of reliable public transportation, and the limited coverage of art-related events in local online and print media. Despite these factors, and even though the actual sum of money distributed by BREAD! KC appears small, the organization’s social and cultural impact has already proven to be significant. BREAD! KC provides a unique opportunity for the community to directly fund artists, especially those in the beginning stages of their careers and for projects that don’t fit neatly into the existing granting stream. In return, the community learns about great ideas and can experience local art as something social, reciprocal, and convivial.
________ NOTES:
1. Statistics from the Sunday Soup website, http://www.sundaysoup.org.
2. In a further act of generosity, Lugo, after receiving $1065 in May 2011 (the largest amount given to an individual in BREAD! KC’s history), returned half of the money to the organization.
It’s pessimistic to say that we never see people as they truly are. But after a particularly insidious misunderstanding or breakup, I start to feel this way. I become convinced that our perceptions of others are so prejudiced by our own identities as to become essentially invalid, even hallucinatory. To confront a person in a space uncluttered by projections, expectations, hopes, and fears—can such an interaction occur? Is it possible to meet in a third space, one not delimited by competing subjectivities? I thought about this possibility during Art Practical’s three days in Kansas City, as we met with artists who told us about themselves, their practices, and their arts community. Charged with producing an issue of Art Practical based on our impressions, I wondered if we would be able to see beyond the artists’ versions of themselves, beyond our regional lenses and biases, into that imagined, unfettered place.
I thought about this especially during Art Practical’s interview with artist Julia Vering, whose practice involves a process of creative reflection similar to the one we undertook during our short trip. Vering is a social worker at a Kansas City senior center and collaborates with her clients to create multimedia performances. Just as we heard, digested, and interpreted artists’ stories, Vering listens to and absorbs her clients’ memories. As we planned to shape our experiences into a series of articles reflecting our interactions, Vering creates dense portraits of herself and her collaborators by interweaving their stories with her own imaginings. Both endeavors engage with the challenges of reflecting one another and the possibilities for interpretation (and misinterpretation).
Using a methodology of mimicry and mirroring, Vering produces works riddled with fractures: personalities split, appearance and actuality diverge, and storylines deconstruct. In You Live Here Too (2011), she performs as a mannequin who converses individually with a series of elderly women, each adorned in the same red wig. The senior women are data entry specialists for Essentially You, a self-help service that advises mannequins on their wardrobe choices. Vering’s mannequin speaks to them in real time, while the women’s words and actions play on a screen behind her. The footage is ostensibly contained on a VHS tape titled Essentially You’s Guide to Becoming a Better Person Through Clothing Choice, which we see a doll inserting into a VCR at the start of the performance.
The irony of an animated inanimate object speaking to a projection of live women echoes the greater irony of Essentially You: while the service purports to help mannequins make better clothing choices, the life-size dolls are defined by their inability to choose. If a mannequin could choose its own
You Live Here Too, 2011; performance by Julia Vering, the Brick, Kansas City, MO, November 4, 2011.
You Live Here Too, 2011; performance by Julia Vering, the Brick, Kansas City, MO, November 4, 2011.
clothes, it wouldn’t be a mannequin. They function to blindly accept whatever clothes we choose to dress them in, serving as mute surrogates onto whom we project our preferences. Vering’s body double gets a body double when a doll is projected onto the screen behind her, a superimposition that underscores the piece’s concern with the multiplicity of identity.
The specialists rotate as the performance progresses, but each is dressed in the same brocade dress whose fabric echoes the wallpaper. Despite the seamlessness of their outfits, each woman enacts the role differently. Clumsily entering information into the keyboard of a primitive computer (or sometimes just punching the machine, dubbed the Unicornidore 64), each is persistently idiosyncratic. The first specialist is stiff and serious, looking at the camera as she says, “We have a lot to talk about.” The next is animated and goofy. She hits the keyboard with her fist like she is pounding dough and rolls words around in her mouth before finally spitting them out with a grin. Their consistent costuming and inconsistent personalities contradict the narrative’s core premise: that clothing can transform one’s identity. This dissonance between wardrobe and character suggests that clothes cannot in fact alter our fundamental selves.
The third specialist is pensive. Holding up her hand so it appears beside the mannequin’s head, she says, “We share intimate space. It is almost like we are holding hands.” The mannequin replies by holding up her hand so its shadow falls on the image of the woman’s hand. Robotically she answers, “Almost.” Their inability to physically touch highlights the deception implicit not only in the work’s plot but also in its form: though the central conversation mimics a dialogue, it is actually two parallel monologues. The characters exist in two distinct realms—one prerecorded on screen, one live on stage—and this spatial and temporal separation prevents their words from accreting. Instead we get a simulacrum of a conversation whose false appearance speaks to the piece’s other instances of duplicity.
Vering’s work suggests that there is no unfettered place, no calm shore where our perceptions of others are uninterrupted by the way we perceive ourselves. There is only a feedback loop, in which the way you see me affects the way I see you, and this continues ad infinitum. While the journalistic impulse proposes that a mirror image is a re-creation of the original, the illusionistic impulse emphasizes an original’s opposite and inverse. Vering takes this possibility to the extreme, creating reflections of reflections and opposites of opposites. Truth is doubled, tripled, until it is indistinguishable from fiction. Though this hall of mirrors is more disorienting than a pure facsimile, it may ultimately be more realistic.
UPDATE: On February 29, 2012, artist Amber Hansen announced modifications to her project The Story of Chickens. The modifications will enable the project to be in compliance with city ordinances of Lawrence, Kansas, which allow city dwellers to raise domestic fowl but forbids their slaughter within city limits and limits the visibility of chickens kept on private property. Chickens will no longer be displayed, slaughtered, or eaten as part of the project. To read Hansen’s statement about the changes to the project, please visit the Rocket Grant program'sRocketblog!.
________
Local Kansas City artist Amber Hansen has invoked a Great Chicken Controversy with her community art project planned for March and April. In The Story of Chickens: A Revolution, Hansen will create a “nomadic coop” that houses five chickens and will circulate it through high-traffic areas in the downtown Lawrence area over the course of a month. During this time, residents will be encouraged to feed, pet, and generally get to know the animals. At the end of the month, the chickens will be humanely slaughtered by a local farmer and will be prepared as a community meal at a local alternative art space.
According to the official project description, The Story of Chickens is meant to explore “the relationship of humans as both caretakers and consumers.”1 Itwas specifically designed as a local, community-oriented artistic practice and is supported by a Rocket Grant—a competitive grant awarded to Kansas City–area artists, funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation and administered by the Charlotte Street Foundation and the Spencer Museum of Art. In the age of the Internet, however, the local has become global. When food- and animal-rights activists (as well as self-declared art critics) from around the country learned of the project, they immediately protested with righteous indignation. A heated dialogue still ensues on the Rocketblog!.
The most interesting aspect of the controversy is the divide between the local reaction and the national and international responses. The Story of Chickens, along with the other 2011–12 Rocket Grant–sponsored projects, was originally announced in April 2011. At the time, it didn’t raise any eyebrows locally. However, in February 2012, a controversy erupted and has been dominated by voices from outside the Lawrence-Kansas City community. While a few local voices have joined in the project’s condemnation and several others have spoken in support of the artist, the community has been generally silent in the public debate. This striking split cannot be attributed solely to Midwesterners’ real or perceived cultural reluctance to engage in open confrontation. It seems likely that it also reflects a deeper understanding of food production and consumption that comes from living in a primarily rural agricultural state.
Kansas City built its reputation on the beef industry and, in fact, is still best known throughout the nation for its steak and barbecue. Although the Kansas City Stockyards closed in 1991, after 120 years of operation, the city’s cow-town roots remain strong. Food is central not only to the collective identity of the area but also to the economy: Kansas currently ranks third in beef production and fourth in total animal and meat production in the United States, and one in five people in the state is employed in a position related to agriculture and food production.2
Amber Hansen. Drawings and a scale model of chicken coops for The Story of Chickens. Courtesy of the Washington Post. Photo: Rich Sugg, Associated Press.
And though certainly not everyone in Kansas grew up on a farm, the fact is that we are barely one hundred years removed from the pioneers who came to the Midwest and transformed the vast prairie into the breadbasket of the nation. This perhaps lends those of us who call this place home a certain respect for the land that is lacking in those who have never known anything other than steel skyscrapers, concrete parking lots, and the endless sprawl of expressways. It’s one of the hidden treasures of life in the flyover states.
In some ways, the Great Chicken Controversy is comparable to the recent dispute over Tom Otterness’s projects awarded by the San Francisco Arts Commission, in light of his early Shot Dog Film(1977). Viewed with only an outsider’s knowledge of the Otterness situation, the controversies seem similar: animal rights activists protest the killing of animals in the name of art.3 Yet, there is a distinction between San Franciscans’ outrage over what appears to be the senseless killing of a dog for shock value—Otterness has yet to give any compelling reason for shooting the dog—and Internet denizens’ outrage over the humane slaughter of five chickens for a community meal in Lawrence, Kansas.4
That distinction is fundamentally rooted in the sense of place. In a culturally sensitive postmodern world, we should be wary of moral absolutes that claim to be universally applicable. Instead, we must seek to understand values and actions that arise from specific contexts. Nonetheless, the culture gap between Kansas and San Francisco is real—not to mention the culture gap between Kansas and the nebulous world of the Internet. The ethicality of shooting dogs or slaughtering chickens in the name of art should not rest upon an abstract argument about which types of violence, if any, are permissible and for what ends. Rather, individual communities must wrestle with these deeper philosophical issues for themselves, and there may be as many different valid answers as there are people and times and places.
This is exactly how art can serve as a catalyst for public dialogue: it causes a viewer to reflect on the world in such a way that she comes to understand herself and her world anew. The beginnings of this (r)evolution can already be seen in Lawrence, and I am excited to see how The Story of Chickens transforms the community as it unfolds. For those in the rest of the world who are watching, I hope that they too might reflect on this project and its response and come to a deeper understanding of their relationships with other living beings—even if that understanding is different from ours.
2. Kansas Farm Facts 2010, U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service, Kansas Field Office, in cooperation with Kansas Department of Agriculture.
3. And Otterness is originally from Kansas, which makes it even more tempting to draw parallels.
4. Editor's note: Otterness publicly apologized for Shot Dog Film in 2008. Mary Frost, "Artist Apologizes for Decades-old Dog-Killing Incident," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 14, 2008, as cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Otterness#cite_note-20.
In the catalogue of his 1976 exhibition I am Not Blind: An Information Environment About Unsighted People, the conceptual artist Les Levine wrote: “It is a misconception to assume that unsighted people want a different life experience from those who are sighted. It also seems unnecessary that unsighted people be excluded from those kinds of experiences we normally consider to be purely conceptual.”1 Unwittingly, the Los Angeles–based artist Gina Osterloh channels this philosophy in the photographic series and documentary film currently on view in her exhibition Anonymous Front. By reconceptualizing notions of camouflage and blindness, Osterloh addresses vision as a state of mind. Camouflage, framed as the psychological control of vision, has anchored the artist’s photographic practice for the past five years. However, the documentary film New Vision, which features testimonials of the blind in the Philippines, establishes a new focus for Osterloh’s work and explores the philosophical and phenomenological issues surrounding blindness. In the space between the abstract and the documentary, these concepts breathe life into broader questions of social belonging, cultural literacy, foreignness, racial colorblindness, blending in, and standing out.
Osterloh’s colorful photographic series depicts staged figures that often appear camouflaged or with missing faces or truncated limbs. She manipulates the surface condition between body and room to create a shifting mise-en-scène, questioning the structural integrity of our field of vision and calling up what she describes as the “horror and ecstasy of identification.”2 When her figures emerge from their patterned environments, it’s clear that our perception of what is real depends fundamentally on the identification of difference, which is both a physiological and psychological act: ascertaining figure from ground, self from other, and individual from group.3
Installed on one side of the gallery, Osterloh’s photos present variations of a wallpapered stage, the images flattened by the camera lens and by the wallpaper’s camouflage print. A full-scale camouflage stage in the gallery mimics the one pictured in Osterloh’s images and serves as a fourth wall and a physical seam linking the photographic set to the cinematic space behind it: the film, New Vision, is projected on the back of the stage. Taking its name from the cooperative massage-therapy school for the blind in Manila where Osterloh conducted interviews, the film captures the sense of place that Osterloh witnessed on a 2007 trip to the Philippines—her mother’s homeland—and that lured her back repeatedly. For Osterloh, the Philippines is a site of perpetual return, a place
Anonymous Front, 2010; archival pigment photograph; 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
Installation view of New Vision,2011–12; high-definition video. Courtesy of the Artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
both specific and obscured, mediated through the memories of her mother and the fantasies of Western colonial history.
The film explores the corporeal consciousness of the blind and seeks, with the testimonials of real people, to give voice to blindness not as a static state of being but as a continual process of transformation and acceptance. When asked how they identify themselves, interviewees speak in phenomenological terms: they describe feeling and hearing the wind in order to orient oneself and the impossibility of doing so in an enclosed room, navigating the world kinesthetically through the body language of a guide, and finding non-optical interfaces for apprehension and registration, such as touch. As one interviewee reports: “Senses never disappear; they just transfer. You transfer your sense of seeing to a sense of touch.”
Osterloh’s framing of this reality suggests that the flattened spaces of the photographs may be unlikely ciphers for the mise-en-scène of the blind, which, as Jacques Derrida writes, “is always inscribed in a theater or theory of the hands.”4 Struggling to read Osterloh’s photographs in purely optical terms, viewers may be reminded that blindness ruptures depth perception and that discerning figure from ground, or fixing something in one’s vision, becomes a task of tangibility (from tangere, “to touch”). Physical touch registers what is spatially immediate while hearing, described by R. Murray Schafer as “a way of touching at a distance,” extends beyond the body.5 Osterloh’s film, which attends to the lush textural and sonic environment of its subjects, brings the blank and mute qualities of the studio photographs into focus. Their hermetic trompe l’oeil aesthetic invokes disorientation, something most people don’t often experience in a closed space unless, as articulated by one interviewee, one is without vision: “In an enclosed space, the sound is deafening. You can’t feel the wind. You won’t hear a thing because the door is closed.”
Osterloh presents blindness as an alternative consciousness rather than a disability and pulls back the curtains of fantasy that have mediated our view of the Philippines; she sheds light on an experience and a place that seem perpetually foreign. Osterloh asks the interviewees to summon their last memories of the visual world and links these to the mediated present of the blind and to her inherited connection to the Philippines in order to propose a set of philosophical questions: How do you make a body whole again? Do the ties that bind individuals to a group reside in the body or in the mind? The artist’s oscillation between the real and the abstract registers a renewed vision of self and other and of how we identify ourselves as bodies. Anonymous Front is a conceptually rigorous exercise in focus and registration. It is not for the impatient; in fact, viewers may strain to bridge the myriad dialectical spaces of artistic labor that Osterloh has set up. But precisely in that straining between abstraction and reality, concepts of form take on philosophical import, most fundamentally in the process of understanding difference.
1. Les Levine, I am Not Blind: An Information Environment for the Unsighted (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1976).
2. From a conversation with the artist, January 21, 2012.
3. The concept of the figure-ground relationship, a central theory of perception in gestalt psychology, refers to a cognitive ability to separate elements based upon contrast. In the 1960s, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan extended this concept to society, exploring how perception can alter our consciousness of the surrounding world: technology, for example, brings different social elements into focus and causes others to recede into the background. This concept was one of the underpinnings of his theory that “the medium is the message.”
4. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 26.
5. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1994, reprint), 11.
Between 1970 and 1987, Andy Warhol took thousands of pictures using his Polaroid Big Shot—a camera designed specifically for portraits, with a fixed focal distance of about four feet—capturing a variety of subjects, including intimate, closely cropped portraits. Many of these images were subsequently used in Warhol’s silkscreened paintings and prints. Eight years earlier, in 1962, the artist Ray Johnson, a lesser-known contemporary of Warhol who has been called the initiator of mail art, started his network of art-by-post, the New York Correspondance School (deliberately misspelled by the artist). Johnson’s “school” and correspondence-based art projects continued until his death in 1995.
Two new MATRIX exhibitions, Andy Warhol: Polaroids and Tables of Content: Ray Johnson and Robert Warner Bob Box Archive, present these artists side by side, in a single gallery space separated by a sheer black screen. The arrangement invites the viewer to compare the work of these contemporaries, and there are interesting parallels between them despite the obvious material and formal differences of their respective practices. Most noticeable in the work on view at UC Berkeley Art Museum (BAM/PFA) is Warhol’s and Johnson’s shared preoccupation with wealth and celebrity, subjects they each treat with fascination and unease.
Drawing on the more than one hundred Polaroids and gelatin-silver prints that comprise a gift to BAM/PFA from the Andy Warhol Foundation, curators Stephanie Cannizzo and Fabian Leyva-Barragan selected forty Polaroids, representing an array of Warhol’s “beautiful people,” a mix of famous faces and virtual unknowns who met Warhol’s loose criteria (he maintained that every person he met was a beauty).1 Warhol would take up to hundreds of shots to get just the right image, and each portrait is a document of the intimate exchange between sitter and photographer.
That Warhol would consider subjects who were slightly defeated and fragile is exemplified in an ambiguous portrait, Frau Buch (1980). Frau Buch’s painted red lips yield a slight, apprehensive smile. Her curly black hair echoes the fur of the poodle she clutches. Warhol has captured the vulnerability of a sitter who appears uncomfortable in front of a camera but wants to be seen nonetheless. In contrast are the Polaroids of
Ray Johnson. Man O'War, 1971–1988–1994; collage on cardboard panel, 21 1/2 x 18 inches. Museum purchase, bequest of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, by exchange.
an arts patron, Daryl Lillie (1978), who wears the thick white stage makeup that Warhol consistently used for female sitters to soften the flash and conceal wrinkles. The makeup’s effect flattens the image and acts like a mask, a barrier between Lillie and the camera. Despite Lillie’s awkward, caked makeup, with splotches of it visible on her chest, her gaze remains open and confident. She appears comfortable in front of the camera and in Warhol’s presence.
Like Warhol’s oeuvre, Johnson’s work is filled with references to art world and Hollywood celebrities, but his approach is distinctly iconoclastic. In keeping with Johnson’s offhand aesthetic, the display of his Bob Box Archive is quite casual. Hundreds of offbeat items (letters, beach toys, garbage, and everyday objects) are arranged, stacked, and piled on an assortment of tables in the center of the gallery. On one table, discarded items—including an old pair of sunglasses, pieces of rope, a dirty glove, and rocks—are piled high atop a tattered fragment of an American flag.
Johnson pokes fun at major art world figures and movements, eschewing allegiance to any of them. On the right wall of the gallery, a row of letters between Johnson and the optician Robert Warner includes images of movie stars or artists such as James Dean or Jackson Pollock that are photocopied, scribbled over, and written on. A drawing of a bunny sporting a large hoop earring is assigned the name Max Ernst. It hangs between a drawing of Philip Guston’s upside-down bathtub and a collage that combines a newspaper clipping of a chimpanzee sitting in a restaurant with an image of a bicycle seat.
Bunny motifs are an ongoing theme for Johnson. One letter to Warner is composed of a grid of cute bunnies with the names of famous and unknown people assigned to each one. Cartoon speech bubbles along the top announce the “Locust Valley Biennale 1990” (after he was mugged in New York in 1968, Johnson retreated to the quiet suburb of Locust Valley). Johnson and Warner are included in the cast of bunnies, along with a mix of names from high and low culture, including Christo, Gary Larson, John Tesh, Betsey Johnson, Louise Bourgeois, and Sean Penn.
Warhol’s and Johnson’s artworks reveal their complicated and conflicted relationships to the elite, powerful, and influential figures who frequently appear as subjects of their admiration and derision. The intimate quality of Warhol's Polaroid portraits relies heavily on the relationship he cultivated with each subject, and it is this intimacy that makes them unique within his body of work. Meanwhile, Johnson’s commentary on New York’s art and social scenes is so readily transparent because of the distance he kept from those worlds.
Andy Warhol: Polaroids and Tables of Content: Ray Johnson and Robert Warner Bob Box Archive are on view at UC Berkeley Art Museum through May 20, 2012.
_______ NOTES:
1. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again) (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 61.
As part of its epic survey of postwar California art, the J. Paul Getty Museum is currently displaying one of the largest pieces of California Minimalism ever created: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column (1975–76). From Start to Finish focuses not only on the work itself but also on the history of its creation and its restoration thirty-five years later. In its current installation, Gray Column is an impressive and totemic example of the Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Artists including Larry Bell, Helen Pashgian, and Robert Irwin were captivated by the physicality of the atmosphere in Los Angeles. As the critic Dave Hickey notes in the introduction to a recent exhibition catalogue of 1960s California Minimalism, “The consequence of living in this full world, in a world without emptiness, is that…[the] object and its atmosphere, the mind and the body, the self and the other all flutter, fade, and intermingle at the edges.”1 In contrast to the crisply defined light of the East Coast, the West Coast artists of the Light and Space movement celebrated the thick Hollywood haze.
The Light and Space movement focused on a viewer’s changing perception when confronted with the unstable. Yet these artists were also known, sometimes dismissively, as “Finish Fetish” artists because they utilized the latest industrial materials such as polyester resins and fiberglass. This infatuation with seductive surfaces caused their work to be derided by some of their East Coast contemporaries as overly decorative. New York artists including Tony Smith, Richard Serra, and Carl Andre favored traditional construction materials such as steel, wood, and brick, often contracting a work’s fabrication. The resulting sculptures are aggressively assertive, daring viewers to walk on or under them, threatening them with their sheer size or precarious orientation. Their California counterparts shared an appreciation for industrial aesthetics but used space-age materials—they were chemists instead of construction workers, and the pristine surfaces of their finished products belied the amount of physical work behind them. In this context, the Getty presents Valentine’s piece as a long-lost Light and Space masterwork.
Whereas Valentine’s Gray Column is similar in scale to the works of many New York minimalists, it is not nearly as confrontational. It does not invade a viewer’s space or confine one’s movement but instead invites viewers into its depths. The inky, smooth, dark-gray slab rises as a single, massive block of cast polyester resin, standing 12 feet high by 8 feet wide and weighing 3,500 pounds. Looking at it head-on is like gazing into a murky lake, and a viewer is confronted by her irregular reflection in the darkness. As one looks upward, the solidity of the gray gives way to transparency and the effect of a mirror becomes that of a window. Despite the column’s imposing presence, the viewer does not so much look at it as
Gray Column, 1975-1976; polyester resin; 140 x 87.5 x 9.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Getty Center, Los Angeles.
De Wain Valentine polishing Gray Column in 1976. Courtesy of the Artist and the Getty Center, Los Angeles.
look into or through it. In a well-produced video that accompanies the exhibition, Valentine explains how the atmosphere of Los Angeles influenced him—how “the smog became a substance…and the quality of the light had a body to it.” Instead of recreating an image of the haze, Valentine recreated an experience of it.
In order to capture the unique conditions of this contemporary city, Valentine and many of his colleagues used materials that referenced the aesthetics of surfing, custom car culture, and the area’s burgeoning aerospace industry—materials that had not previously been associated with and may not have been best suited for artistic production. Industrial polyester resins of the time, for example, cured too quickly to be used for large pieces and would crack as they hardened. In 1966, Valentine developed his signature resin with Hastings Plastics. After the painstaking casting process, Gray Column had to be polished arduously for days by Valentine and his assistants. Beginning with coarse-grit sanding wheels, the process was finished by hand buffing with auto wax to achieve the pristine finish that, ironically, would leave little trace of its manufacture.
From Start to Finish touches on both this initial creation and the recent restoration of Gray Column undertaken by the Getty Conservation Institute. Though the conservators now have the ability to polish the surface to a much higher sheen than was originally achieved, they decided after consulting Valentine only to remove the scratches that had accrued since the work’s creation. Valentine’s original intent was to create as smooth a surface as possible, yet it is more important to understand that the work has a place in history, and to alter its appearance beyond its original state would be dishonest to this history. The Getty goes further than simply restoring the surface of the piece; the sculpture is also presented in a vertical orientation for the first time. In its original setting, the headquarters of a Chicago pharmaceutical company, the piece was part of a diptych whose two parts rested on their sides because they could not stand upright. At the time, the monolithic pair—then called Two Gray Walls—was relegated to being little more than a room divider. Since the Getty exhibition separates the work from any architectural demands, a viewer can instead focus on her relationship to the piece, as originally intended.
In presenting this newly restored example of the Light and Space movement, the Getty attempts a broader restoration of the role of California Minimalism within the art of the 1960s and ’70s. With a focus on the process of Gray Column’s creation, the exhibition proposes that Valentine and his compatriots were concerned with similar formal concerns as their New York peers but that they cultivated an openness to materials and inspiration specific to their geography. More than simply making less rigorous versions of what was happening on the other side of the country, Light and Space artists created works that could only have originated from this locale but that had significant resonance well beyond its boundaries.
Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine's Grey Column is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, through March 11, 2012.
For at least two decades now there has been an ongoing interest in art’s sideshows. One of the earliest manifestations was Deep Storage, the 1998 Munich exhibition organized by the Haus der Kunst and Siemens Kulturprogramm, which included forty artists whose works touched on issues surrounding archives and storage. Over the past decade, Kate Fowle has curated several iterations of her project the backroom, which displayed artists’ research materials. For many years, the late Steven Leiber collected ephemera, including press releases and exhibition announcements among many other items. Leiber argued that these things were as much a part of the meaning and value of an exhibition as the actual artwork.
One can find parallel research, exhibition, and collection practices that focus on the acquisition of art objects created by famous artists but obtained outside the conventional distribution system. In San Francisco, for instance, the collectors Larry Banka and Judith Gordon have amassed works by about one hundred artists—ranging from a stuffed animal by Jeff Koons to a necktie by Yayoi Kusama—that were made as multiples, either to benefit not-for-profit organizations or as entrepreneurial ventures.
The new San Francisco gallery Will Brown, located in the space formerly occupied by the now defunct Triple Base, takes up this theme for its first exhibition. The exhibition is a collaboration among the artist-curators Zachary Royer Scholz, Brion Nuda Rosch, and David Kasprzak. There is no person named Will Brown; the name, in the spirit of the gallery’s programs, was appropriated from various sources. Will Brown presents Illegitimate Business, an exhibition of sixteen works obtained by shady or shadowy means by anonymous collectors, appropriately displayed in its speakeasy-like basement space, accessible only through a trap door in the floor of the gallery.
Illegitimate Business, 2012; installation view, Will Brown, San Francisco. Courtesy of Will Brown.
Illegitimate Business, 2012; installation view, Will Brown, San Francisco. Courtesy of Will Brown.
Each object is accompanied by a text from its collector, explaining how the item was obtained. This is a storyteller’s delight, and most of us have such stories. At UC Davis, where I work, one often hears about how the original Slant Step disappeared from the first show it inspired, and how those in possession of the object make it available from time to time, as most recently for Constance Lewallen’s A Rose Has No Teeth:Bruce Nauman in the 1960s at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. In another story, Nauman’s UC Davis studio mate for decades saved Nauman’s discarded drawings from the floor of their studio, drawings that would eventually finance his healthcare during his final years of illness.
The first object on view in Illegitimate Business is a cookie jar in the form of the Aunt Jemima character. Its owner rented an apartment that had been occupied by the artist Carrie Mae Weems; the jar was a prop made by Weems for a photograph and was left behind when she moved. This example describes one of the more legitimate strategies for acquisition in the show. Others are more underhanded: a teaching assistant borrowed videos from an art-school library and made copies for himself; an anonymous collector used the bathroom at a funky Mission gallery and took a couple of Chris Johanson drawings stored there; an art handler pocketed Kara Walker’s installation sketches rather than throwing them away. The show is a litany of art world opportunity crimes: objects borrowed but never returned; gallery employees’ revenge for low pay, digital prints made from vintage photo misprints saved by passersby; long-term loans that were somehow forgotten.
These are, by and large, charming stories of human frailty, of succumbing to minor temptations and the love of art. This public exhibition somehow brings closure to the private acts portrayed; it’s the opposite of the (probably apocryphal) Van Gogh sitting in a vault in Japan. On the other hand, the curators gently point to the reality of commerce’s effect on human relations and the politics of art distribution systems. Not far removed are the acts of those who smashed the kiosk of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street program to grab a work by Margaret Kilgallen or Jason Jagel, depriving thousands of a public pleasure for their private satisfaction.
Illegitimate Business is on view at Will Brown, in San Francisco, through February 26, 2012.
Pen caps, coins, ticket stubs, receipts, business cards, pebbles, rocks, string, spring clamps, painters tape, plastic cups, tumblers, Ikea desk lamps, vision charts, color blindness tests, arched strips of wood, mobiles, inkjet prints of rocky landscapes: Sarah Sze uses these odds and ends to form installations and to ask, “How does something become a work of art, as opposed to remaining a mundane object?” It’s a risky, provocative inquiry, but the installations on view in Infinite Line at the Asia Society fall short of achieving a productive tension.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of random objects (pity the museum registrar!) take up residence in one large gallery. They compose eight separate installations, though the arrangements are so sprawling and the materials so similar, it’s unclear where one ends and another begins. A paradox emerges while one tiptoes between the works: aggregations of variety can manifest sameness. The experience is simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming. How can one possibly sustain enough attention for every bit and bob? And, scanning the knickknacks, no gist arises from them. If the works advance a material or technical investigation, the findings are inconclusive. How does art arise from these accumulations of everyday things? How does a whole exceed the sum of its parts?
The curatorial statement promises “lyrical” moments and, to be fair, I did find some. It was a pleasant surprise for one’s eye to follow Sze’s placement of objects beyond the gallery in Random Walk Drawing (Window) (2011). This installation begins inside the gallery but continues outside the window, onto the roof of the marquee below. I imagined the exposed rocks and ephemera suffering winter freezes and thaws—so unlike the sterile museum environment. The work includes a color landscape image transferred to the length of a wooden beam. Nearby, string has been painstakingly wrapped around rocks in concentric contour lines, suggesting elevation. It’s a charming transformation from a topographical map feature into a crafted, physical object. Random Walk Drawing (Compass) (2011) smartly integrates gallery apparatuses
Checks and Balances, 2011; stone, string, and ink on archival paper; 75 x 18 x 2 inches. Collection of Stuart and Sherry Christhilf. Photo: Jean Vong.
Random Walk Drawing (Window), 2011; mixed media. Courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.
typically ignored: the installation’s wallpaper has cutouts for the security alarm console, and among the detritus is the gallery’s hygrothermograph, which monitors the room’s humidity and temperature. The wit of these gestures, however, felt disproportionate to the amount of attention invested.
Given my attraction to the idea of formlessness and my fascination with notions of objecthood and commodification, I had high hopes for this exhibition. Instead, I found the arrangements provisional, aimless, and at times even indolent. I don’t think impactful works of art must transcend quotidian life, but they have to register as aesthetic experiences in some dimension.
The psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick E. Robinson describe four dimensions of aesthetic experience in The Art of Seeing (1987): perceptual, communicative, intellectual, and emotional.1 In Infinite Line, there is much to perceive, but I found the communicative, intellectual, and emotional repercussions of the exhibition to be diffuse. I don’t believe this was due to my own passivity. As Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson note, viewers should bring energy and expertise to works of art. In return, they can hope to engage worthy challenges. Otherwise, the effort is tiresome and fruitless. I found Sze’s terrain—the elusive step between mundanity and art—compelling as an artist’s dilemma but tedious as a viewing experience.
In contrast to her sprawling installations, Sze’s two-dimensional works also on view in this exhibit offer a tidier and more conventional viewing experience. Early drawings and prints juxtapose architectural renderings and Asian landscape paintings, evincing Sze’s skillful hand and dynamic compositions. These works have a secure status as aesthetic artifacts because they operate within the pictorial plane and use familiar media and methods of display. Sze’s recent screen prints of color-blindness tests fulfill similar criteria but, upon further reflection, I see how the artist might be exploring the gap between object and artwork as well. Though they are framed as fine-art prints, the images still resemble and can probably function similarly to their optometric sources.
Infinite Line can be characterized by the gap between art and non-art objects, not for the fertile aesthetic potential that the artist pursued but rather for the incongruity between Sze’s two-dimensional and three-dimensional works, as well as the unintended effects of publicity images. The Asia Society’s website displays a number of Sze’s past works, whose scale, ambition, playfulness, and resolution exceed that of the installations on view; the website content, unfortunately, primes viewers for a very different experience than what the galleries can deliver.
Checks and Balances (2011), which appears on the press release and brochure cover, is small in scale yet manages to reconcile the show’s dualistic theme. This impossibly delicate assembly of inked-and-cut paper is cheekily pinned to the wall with blue thumbtacks and adorned with pebbles on strings. It’s casually displayed, yet it is coherently composed and visually compelling. Its facture and imagery pull it toward artwork status, while its display and quotidian, non-mimetic media push it toward objecthood. Checks and Balances exhibits tension and resolution, providing much-needed traction for understanding how mundane objects become artworks.
Infinite Line is on view at Asia Society, in New York, through March 25, 2012.
________ NOTES:
1. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick Emery Robinson, The Art of Seeing: Toward an Interpretive Psychology of the Aesthetic Encounter (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987).
Who is the elegantly waifish woman—with high cheekbones, flaxen hair, and sharp almond eyes—pictured in some of Remedios Varo’s paintings? Judging from the vitrine containing vintage photographs and other ephemera in this rare gem of an exhibition, it could be Varo herself, in stylized self-portrait, or at the very least, an idealized proxy. Almost always, this figure is furtively looking over her shoulder, as if she were evading capture or seeking escape. While it is unclear who or what might be pursuing her, always visible are what she may be trying to escape: dark, confining spaces composed of high walls and quasi-Gothic architecture that enclose Varo’s figures in complex, claustrophobic pictorial mazes.
The eight paintings and six drawings included in this exhibition date from 1936 and include excellent examples from every decade of Varo’s short career (she died in 1963 at the age of fifty-four). The work titled The Double Agent from 1936 is of particular interest, as it is one of the very few that survive from the years that Varo lived in Paris (1937–41), where she had fallen under the spell of Surrealism. The painting is quite small and painted with lustrous oil applied to a copper plate, which makes it appear to have been executed in egg tempera. It depicts the grotesque scene of a woman being sexually assaulted by a large and hideous insect, and there is something both urgent and inconsistent in the way that the paint is applied to these two figures: it jumps rather abruptly from conventional descriptive modeling to hastily expressionistic passages. Both figures inhabit a room that seems to have been rented from Salvador Dali, a maison imaginaire, portentously decorated with seven disembodied breasts, mounted on the far wall in a way that eerily prefigures the sculpture that Eva Hesse would make three decades later. This painting also sports the brightest and most complicated color of any painting in the exhibition; in Varo’s mature style, her color became subdued into moody earth tones of rust and reddish brown. In this aspect, her work was influenced by the pre-Columbian sculpture that she found so fascinating in her adopted home of Mexico, where she lived for her final twenty-two years, after she exited Paris just prior to the Nazi occupation.
One special treat of this exhibition is its inclusion of six of Varo’s drawings, almost all of which seem to have been
Retrato del doctor Ignacio Chávez (Portrait of Dr. Ignacio Chávez), 1957; oil on masonite; 37 x 24 in. Courtesy of Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco.
L'agent double (Double Agent), 1936; oil on copper; 9.75 x 7.75 in. Courtesy of Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco.
continuously worked as preparatory studies for paintings. At least one of these drawings is clearly related to an adjacent painting, Portrait of Dr. Ignacio Chavez (1957). The similarities and discrepancies between the two reveal much about Varo’s working method, which is clearly rooted in deliberate compositional strategies rather than any Surrealist immersion into the unconscious. The drawing shows Varo’s reworking of the relationship between the two figures, repeating the female in the painting three times to suggest a psychoanalytic assembly line, where the male doctor applies his special key to the hearts of three identical women.
What is particularly remarkable about Varo’s work is the way that it harks back to Gothic painting of the tenth and eleventh centuries, particularly that of Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1178), with its emphasis on involuted and idiosyncratic pictorial spaces and crisply stylized allegorical figures. The associations that might be made between Surrealist and Gothic painting have never been properly explored, but we might remember that André Breton once remarked that he had never—nor would he ever—visit Italy. (No remnants or rebirths of Classical civilization for him!) Certainly, there is a secret affinity between Surrealism and the medieval worldview: both prized spiritual ambition and both deplored worldly materialism. But this analogy is problematic for a number of reasons. One of these is the fact that women were never allowed by their male Surrealist counterparts to have a spiritual status because they were relegated to the roles of muses in service to male artists. To their credit, those women rebelled against that position and made art that was every bit as insistent on realizing their own “subjective realism” as that of their male colleagues.
In fact, the feminist mantra proclaiming that the personal is the political seems to have clear Surrealist roots, and few painters then (or now) made art that was more personally idiosyncratic than Varo did. But her work never stopped at that point. Instead, it revealed a disciplined focus, the necessary ingredient for translating the personal into tightly wrought allegories that may have been too subtle and sophisticated to be overtly political but were nonetheless prophetic of a great many things to come. Indeed, although Varo’s work can at times err on the side of excessive stylization, it still might contend as a worthy art historical precursor to the New Old Master painting. Donald Kuspit coined this genre, proclaiming it a necessary antidote to what he called postart spectacle—pseudo-conceptual art designed to make symbiotic teams of artists and curators of large institutions seem democratically relevant in the sphere of vision that is in fact governed by the mass media. For Kuspit, New Old Master art “brings us a fresh sense of the purposefulness of art,” and Varo’s enigmatic Gothic revivals still have the power to guide us to an understanding of that purposefulness.1
Flannel and Fur, Danny Keith’s solo show of recent paintings at Ratio 3, includes fifteen portraits of bearded young men and one study of a classical bust. All but three of the portraits are made of oil on wood panel, and the others are watercolors on paper. The works are academic in the traditional sense, with particular attention paid to naturalistic lighting and figure proportions. The works’ scale and intense study of a single posed subject, combined with the artist’s layered modulation of color and tonality—mixing paint on the palette and the canvas as if negotiating between the two—suggest that they were made from observation.
By engaging with traditional modes of representation in a highly personal way, Keith’s paintings propose alternatives to gendered clichés of beauty by presenting male images that are both masculine and pretty. Fox Fur, Fox FurNo.2, Fox FurNo.3, and Fox FurNo.4 (all 2011), for example, depict the same model from the waist up, nude save for a tanned-fox fur either draped around his shoulders or propped on his head. In each painting, Keith returns to the same subject from different angles, repeating the same lighting source and background colors. His brushwork both strives for an honest realism and meticulously records every freckle, tuft of fur, and chest hair.
Flannel Shirt No. 1, Flannel Shirt No. 2, and Hunter’s Plaid (all 2011) depict the same model wearing a plaid textile wrapped around his head or draped over one shoulder. Repose No. 2 (2011), the smallest work in the show, measuring 12 by 18 inches, is the only piece to depict the model’s entire body: he’s nude, lying face down on a bed, possibly sleeping. The image is both erotically charged and intimate, with looser brushwork, but Keith still carefully captures the play of light and shadows across the room and the model, depicting every toe, a tattoo, and even the translucency of an earlobe.
Keith’s use of the same subject, repeated visual patterns, and consistently detailed brushwork throughout this body of
Fox Fur No. 3, 2011; oil on panel; 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.
Fox Fur No. 2, 2011; oil on panel; 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.
work recalls Félix González-Torres’s tender, minimalist installations. Unlike Keith’s overt figures, González-Torres created metaphorical portraits of intimate same-sex relationships (sometimes his own) that explored and transcended identity politics by using simple objects as stand-ins for human subjects. Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1987–1990), which features two synchronized wall clocks hung side by side, uses formal repetition to evoke the effortless sensation of a good interpersonal match and the constancy of real intimacy.
Keith’s repeated subject matter demonstrates a similar devoted, prolonged engagement, and his formal use of repetition within the brushwork and composition of each portrait symbolizes this emotional connection. But while González-Torres’s later works invite direct audience interaction, offering candies or prints to the viewer, Keith’s traditional paintings remain passive. This apparent difference between the two artists’ approaches masks a common theme in their subject matter: neither style of representation, pictorial or metaphorical, can bring forth a human presence, no matter how many people participate with a work or how accurate the representation appears.
The paintings occasionally flirt with metaphorical content, using symbols such as flowers (in Spanish Rose and I Hope All My Days Will Be Lit By Your Face, both 2011) and the fox fur, which evokes a vivid sensation of fur on bare skin and plays on the material flexibility of a feminine fox stole or masculine fox hood. More pointedly, Keith’s sincere renderings and complex, vibrant colors convey a longing for his subjects and create an emphatic sense of each model’s individual physicality. Additionally, in all but three of the works, Keith’s delicate depiction of his subject’s dreamy, inward gaze deepens the intimacy of each portrait.
Keith’s images of male beauty and the palpable vulnerability of his desire complicate the idea that the power involved in every erotic depiction only functions in one direction. His tender attention to every freckle and hair displays a sense of responsibility as opposed to a license to idealize or objectify. The ambiguity of Keith’s relationships with his subjects leads to narrative speculation, and his presentation of beautiful but heteronormatively masculine men makes such fantasies available. By working so intimately and personally, Keith offers viewers a broad and fluid range of identification and interpretation.
Flannel and Fur is on view at Ratio 3 in San Francisco through February 18, 2012.
The full-color prints by the California-based photographer Todd Hido at Stephen Wirtz Gallery depict decaying and deteriorating suburban developments and the mysterious people inside them. Last year, Hido’s Fragmented Narratives at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York featured some of the same works, and Excerpts from Silver Meadows resumes his atmospheric surveillance of American culture. The images are personal and somber and, as a suite, the sequenced photographs suggest isolation, terror, and an impending slow, silent destruction.
Hido, who trained with the photographer Larry Sultan (1946–2009) at California College of the Arts (CCA), has been compared to the filmmaker David Lynch for a tendency toward strangeness as well as to the writer Raymond Carver for haunting depictions of hardscrabble struggles in America. In fact, in 2009, Hido’s lucid, luminous pictures of suburban houses at night—his most popular body of work—appeared on the Vintage Contemporaries softcover backlist celebrating Carver’s twenty-fifth anniversary. But the painterly shrouded trucks, tract homes, and desolate highways in Excerpts from Silver Meadows, created between 1996 and 2011 in Hido’s childhood home of Ohio, might be more aptly placed on the covers of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (Knopf, 2006) or Robert Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead (2003–present). Hido doesn’t so much engage his own childhood landscape as encounter it from inside a car, and the results recall the pictorialist images of Alfred Steiglitz.
This exhibition presents a gray, dusky world of neglect and disaster. In Untitled #10695 (2011), two figures stand at the top of a crest; skeletal treetops pierce a ghostly darkness. In Untitled #6349 (2008), a collapsed oak lies in the arm-like branches of nearby trees, its own roots exposed; a field of
Untitled #8906, 2009; Chromogenic print; 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco.
Untitled #10695, 2011; Chromogenic print; 38 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco.
brown grasses, recalling Andrew Wyeth’s Trodden Weed (1951), seems dead, lifeless. And, as if fleeing an unknown horror, a black crow descends onto a flat, snow-crusted bank in Untitled #1019 (2011). The landscapes suggest cataclysmic events or a strange dreamlike descent among a population.
Hido creates his landscape images from behind a blurred windshield, using a field camera and natural light; droplets of moisture create a transportive, hallucinatory sheen. A frozen body of water in Untitled #10253 (2011) suggests the bleak, despairing awe a child might experience while alone at a riverbank’s edge or some ruined lake of the future. The straight and slender cables of utility poles in Untitled #9198 (2010) magically fade along an empty and unraveling highway; only the presence of lonely tire tracks in the snow signals that others have been there.
Spread throughout the galleries are portraits of “broken starlets in suburban dress.”1 Although these figures are present within each chapter of the exhibition’s story, these staged and stylized images interrupt an otherwise unified, serious, and savage narrative. That said, Untitled #8906 (2009)—in which a young woman in a flesh-colored bra stands against a plywood wall, appearing like a survivor in a newly brutal world—does fit into the bleak universe of the landscapes. The subject’s startled, sensual isolation evinces the social documentary embedded within the series.
Excerpts from Silver Meadows binds together such fictions with the prescient, sympathetic documentary images Hido has made since the late 1990s; his House Hunting series depicted the interiors of abandoned, foreclosed homes. These might be images of a more distant past or the eroded and frozen Ohio of 2011, plagued by shuttered steel plants and mortgage defaults, or even a future state swollen with environmental waste. In McCarthy’s The Road, the man says: “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”2 These photographs convey a similar saga of loneliness, anonymity, and suffering. As Americans protest and despair over an uncertain future, the stories in Hido’s Excerpts from Silver Meadows are timely and sobering.
Excerpts from Silver Meadows is on view at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, in San Francisco, through February 25, 2012.
In the Jorge Luis Borges short story, “Mutations,” an anonymous narrator recollects her/his experience of looking at three different symbols: an arrow on a wayfinding sign, a decorative rope in a photograph of a Magyar horseman, and a runic cross in a cemetery. “I do not know why I marvel at them so,” Borges writes, “when there is nothing on earth that forgetfulness does not fade, memory alter, and when no one knows what sort of image the future may translate it into.”1
Kota Ezawa’s current exhibition at Haines Gallery conveys a similar sense of wonder in tracing the mutation of symbolic forms as they are translated over time. United by an exaggerated sense of flatness but diverse in materials, this body of work—which includes paper cutouts, drawings on transparency, a silkscreen on mirror, enamel paint on plywood, stereographic prints, and digital animation—evinces Ezawa’s dexterous thinking about his materials’ plasticity and resilience. However, the titular curse of dimensionality provocatively points to the ways that Ezawa’s art also frustrates the experience of looking. The title accentuates the underlying resistance of language and representation to signifying historical truth, even though these methods are our primary means for collective remembrance and critical reflection.
This tension is palpable in Moon from Earth / Earth from Moon (2011), a diptych of drawings on transparent film mounted on adjacent lightboxes. With corresponding scales and horizon lines—the Moon on the left and the Earth on the right—the two celestial objects become interchangeable. On the one hand, the diptych seems to be a simple juxtaposition of two landscapes. On the other hand, the two perspectives—of looking up at the Moon, then down at the Earth—creates an uncanny equivalence of scale, bringing to light how the conventions of landscape photography have shaped the significance of historical events.
The right side of the diptych, Earth from Moon, recreates the iconic Earthrise photograph taken by Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968. Ezawa employs just three basic shapes and five colors to reproduce the venerated image in his characteristically flat and intentionally reductive style. A muddy brown trapezoid with a ragged edge represents the surface of the Moon. It provides a familiar horizon line, layered on top of a black square that represents the daunting vastness of outer space. Earth appears as the blue-marbled and compressed shape in the middle ground of the composition, an incomplete circle partly eclipsed by the shadow of the moon.
Moon from Earth / Earth from Moon, 2011; two Duratrans transparencies & two lightboxes; edition of seven; left: 22 x 32 x 2 inches, right: 26 x 26 x 2 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.
_______ NOTES:
1. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 314.
Nature Scenes, 2011; nine mounted stereographic prints & plywood viewer; edition of five; viewer: 9 x 7.5 x 15 inches, each slide: 3.5 x 7 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.
Ezawa’s use of a famous photograph as source material brings to mind the rephotographed iconic images in the work of Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. But whereas these artists have been the subjects of controversy and accused of stealing the distinctive aura of the original artworks, Ezawa’s lightbox drawing, importantly, traces the primary forms of Earthrise onto a new medium, eliminating all depth of field. His graphic drawing truncates the power of the original photographic image and its authority, as conferred by NASA, as an accurate index of the objective reality of deep space. Ezawa’s flattened reproduction charges that the photographic medium is a fictive technology, prompting the viewer to critically reflect on an image that persists in cultural memory as an uncontested and totalizing view of Earth from the Moon. Photographed while the astronauts were orbiting the Moon on a potentially perilous mission, this image, with its fixed-point perspective, symbolically positions them as technologically empowered giants looking down on the diminutive planet.
Most of the pieces in The Curse of Dimensionality reflect on more familiar terrain. For example, Nature Scenes (2011) is a three-part series of stereographic prints in which each group comprises nine different scenes from Ezawa’s six-minute digital animation, City of Nature (2011), which is itself a compilation of images from popular films such as Deliverance (1972), Jaws (1975), and Brokeback Mountain (2005). A few of the Nature Scenes are available for viewing through custom-made plywood stereoscopes (predecessors of today’s 3-D technology) mounted on the gallery wall at eye level, requiring visitors to look through the magnifying lenses to experience the effect of dimensional depth.
Constructed from plywood, the rectilinear stereoscopes have a pleasingly DIY look. With unfinished surfaces, they complement the printed Nature Scenes. However, the darkened edges of the stereoscopes have a draft-like quality: they appear to be stenciled in space, like flattened images in and of themselves. Their attentive and bold construction subtly comments on the prints, which distill how Hollywood conventionally constructs the idea of nature as something wild and untouched. In this way, Nature Scenes reveals the artificiality of representing the natural, critiquing our futile desire to use technology to record and preserve that which is so heavily mediated.
The Curse of Dimensionality includes more than twenty recent works by Ezawa and demonstrates his sustained effort to capture that delicate tension inherent in representation, as well as its attendant specular technologies, which simultaneously distort and reflect reality. He approaches images as inadequate records of and substitutes for experience, which is always subjective and shaped by our particular locations in time and space. Yet he also recognizes that images carry symbolic power that we intuitively recognize, sometimes crave, and often believe to be true.
The Curse of Dimensionality is on view at Haines Gallery, in San Francisco, through February 18, 2012.
Intersection for the Arts’ group exhibition Here Be Dragons: Mapping Information and Imagination investigates the language and power of mapmaking from a variety of contemporary perspectives. The exhibition’s title references the dragons and monsters some early cartographers drew on maps to indicate the mystery and danger lurking beyond the known. Today, GPS satellites have three-dimensionally mapped both the surface of the earth and the depths of the ocean to within millimeters. There are no more places for dragons to physically lurk, but there are still uncharted terrains for maps to reveal.
About half the artworks in the show engage San Francisco explicitly. The most technologically based of these pieces is JD Beltran and Scott Minneman’s circular, interactive map-table, which allows viewers to aerially fly across a digital globe and to zoom in and out by tilting and turning the table’s surface. The artists have embedded a number of audio recordings of personal narratives at points marked around San Francisco, but this content pales in comparison to the table itself. It is intoxicating to virtually zip up into the atmosphere, drift across the Atlantic, and drop down to check out the Great Pyramids and the adjacent, sprawling Hilton golf resort.
Photographer, computer programmer, and amateur digital cartographer Eric Fischer displays equal, though more understated, technical chops in his series of images that present information mined from publicly accessible data sets and websites like Flickr, Cabspotting, and NextBus. The resulting digital prints of the Bay Area reveal difficult–to–perceive patterns of race, tourism, traffic, and crime. In an art gallery context, Fischer’s graphical statistics possess surprising formal beauty, but they succeed or fail as artworks based on their information’s legibility and relevancy. Pieces that clearly compare occupied versus vacant housing or outline the distribution of adults and children are both visually stimulating and offer interesting new perspectives. But some works, such as one that contains an indecipherable tangle of bus speeds, fail to become anything more than just colorful patterns.
Jenny Odell does not place information within maps, but rather creates ghostly maps by digitally collaging closeups from Google Satellite View and painstakingly removing everything but the tiny, incidental figures they contain. There is something haunting in the way Odell’s ant-like figures—captured in public spaces such as Pier 39, Dolores Park, and Baker Beach—trace sites that have otherwise disappeared. Recognizing these public spaces through amusing human “features,” such as the bathroom line in Dolores Park, is entertaining, but Odell’s work asks deeper questions about the way collective action generates public space.
Wendy MacNaughton. Around Here, 2011 (detail); mixed media. Courtsey of the Artist and Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco.
Tucker Nichols. Untitled (mp1111), 2011; mixed media. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.
Wendy MacNaughton also maps people in space but not from Odell’s distant remove. Drawing on her background in social work, MacNaughton has documented the urban population around Intersection for the Arts through a combination of observation and conversation. Her character study of the neighborhood—built from sketches and hand-lettered recollections affixed atop a grid of streets drawn on the gallery’s wall—offers an intimate portrait of an impoverished but proud community of individuals making do within the shadow of social neglect. MacNaughton’s breezy brushwork and bright color palette lends the work an approachable, friendly quality that contrasts nicely with her subjects’ relative invisibility.
Most of the other works in the show take a decidedly different tack by using the language of mapping as a more abstract aesthetic tool to trace memories, emotions, and imaginary spaces. One of the more elegant of these works is Burst Apart, by Val Britton, which deftly employs her hallmark map-based visual vernacular. Theimmersive installation climbs up and around the gallery’s newly installed spiral staircase, and its subtly muted color scheme wonderfully echoes the weathered, flaking surface of the concrete ceiling toward which it ascends. Delicately strung together with thread, Britton’s continental cutouts sway in otherwise imperceptible air currents and gently dance as visitors ascend and descend the stairs. These unexpected motions lend the piece a whimsical quality that shifts Britton’s lyrical visual vocabulary toward the playful fantasy of fairy tales.
Next to Britton’s installation, Tucker Nichols’ piece takes abstract mapmaking in an even more humorous direction. Nichols’ unassuming drawings are deceptively simple. His crudely rendered abstract city grids are ludicrously pinned and taped to and over a bulletin board. They form a sort of urban ür-map, a delineation of nowhere and everywhere that is profoundly universal and yet no more authoritative than a cocktail napkin sketch.
Taken together, the artworks in Here Be Dragons live up to the exhibit’s subtitle, offering up compelling visions of the ways modern mapmaking can simultaneously encapsulate information and foster imagination. The exhibition is by no means exhaustive, and there are other contemporary artists, such as Guillermo Kuitca and Simon Evans, who could have been included. The show could also have extended the conversation by including iconic older artists such as Alighiero Boetti or Joyce Kozloff. However, Here Be Dragons is not the only exhibition that has explored mapmaking within art. Perhaps cognizant of these previous shows and the wealth of books published on the subject, curator Kevin Chen wisely chose to constrain his exhibition’s scope to two localized types of mapmaking: works defamiliarizing San Francisco’s local terrain and pieces that chart subjective personal landscapes. This limited scope allows the modest-sized Here Be Dragons to selectively expand particular boundaries of what is otherwise an expansive subject.
Here Be Dragons: Mapping Information and Imagination is on view at Intersection for the Arts, in San Francisco, through January 14, 2012.
Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power, composed of work on loan from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, provides a small but potent display of both the flights of inspiration and technical advancements that made fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice an artistic hub. The exhibit is entirely devoted to depictions of people famous, anonymous, and mythological, and is refreshingly light on religious subject matter for a show of Italian Renaissance art. The collection not only offers insight into the artistic foment of the time, it is also a cumulative portrait of a city of robust appetites—for power, wealth, status, beauty, and sensual pleasures. The patronage of the city’s rich supported dynasties of painters, and the cache of commissioning portraits, private erotic artwork, or paintings made with expensive innovations of the time, such as exotic pigments, not only furthered the careers of the artists but altered the characteristics of the art they created. Color, previously considered the sensual, “feminine” element subordinate to the intellectual, “masculine” compositional balance favored by fifteenth-century Florentines, came to dominate the art of the Renaissance.1 Venice was the center not only of the pigment trade between the East and Northern Europe, but of the development of its usage, creating the distinctive richly colored Venetian style. The snug relationship between art and money, status and sensuality, and the masculine and the feminine, is hard to ignore while examining Masters.
Earlier in the epoch, Andrea Mantegna applied the guidelines on linear perspective that architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti explicated in the 1435 treatise De Pictura to his efforts in pictorial realism, evidenced in his painting Saint Sebastian (1457–59). The exaggerated perspective and architectural detail is so minutely rendered, it is almost exhausting to study. Mantegna’s preoccupation with the connection between painting and sculpture resulted in the grisailles David with the Head of Goliath (1490–95) and Sacrifice of Isaac (1490–95), which are their own type of trompe l’oeil. They, too, show off his mastery of Alberti’s principles of perspective as well as his own skill in rendering contour with shading and exaggerating the outlines of figures to create the illusion of relief. It is easy to mistake them at first for marble or plaster friezes.
Other painters’ attempts to capture Venice’s famous light and the need for materials better suited to withstand the local humidity led to innovations in both areas. Paolo Veronese’s pastel fabrics, Titian’s famous “blondes,” the translucent complexions of Giorgione’s portraits—all stand out against the deep hues of the de Young’s walls, which have been specially painted in dark colors for this exhibition. Venetian painters also became more adept at rendering the lush fabrics of their subjects’ (often their patrons) vestments, displayed spectacularly in Titian’s Portrait of Jacopo Strada (1567–68), whom the artist portrays cloaked in white fox fur, black velvet, and salmon-colored satin.
But technical virtuosity does not seem to be what this collection is about. After all, not all the paintings displayed are Titians; some artists of the Veneto suffer by comparison, particularly where depictions of women are concerned. Paris Bordone’s anonymous females are Frankensteins of mismatched, idealized parts: a gravity-defying breast here, a longshoreman’s arm there. Palma Vecchio’s chocolate-box portraits lack the grace and elegant proportions of other idealizations, such as those of Greco-Roman classicism. They also lack the recognizable humanity with which these same Venetian artists endowed their portraits of men, whose sagacious stares and imposing stances, one assumes, they saw as an exaggerated reflection of their status.
Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian. Danaë, ca. 1560; oil on canvas; 53 x 60 in. Courtesy of Gemäldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Andrea Mantegna. Saint Sebastian, 1457-1459; tempera on panel; 23 x 12 in. Courtesy of Gemäldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
For example, Licinio’s Portrait of Ottavio Grimani, Procurator of San Marco (1541), is less accomplished in its rendering of textures than other exhibited works; the noble appears to be wearing a doublet of prosciutto di Parma. Nevertheless, it depicts a believable human being rather than an idealized type. His furrowed brow and grimly set mouth suggest the shrewd intelligence necessary to ascend to the most prestigious position in the Republic of Venice next to the Doge, and his casual posture suggests he is a man comfortable with such a status.
These disparities in the portrayals of men and women are less visible in the work of the more adept painters. In Lavinia as a Matron (1565), Titian depicts his daughter as uncomfortable and stiff—the shy child forced into the spotlight by her superstar parent. But by portraying her ungainliness and her apparent distress at being portrayed at all, Titian has given her something few other painters included here allowed their female subjects: humanity. Even Titian’s figures from antiquity are complex human beings rather than opaque myths. In Lucretia and her Husband (1512–15), Lucretia looks skyward with a mix of grief and defiance, her eyes glistening with tears; in a white-knuckled fist out of view of her husband, she clutches the dagger which she’ll soon use to take her life. That indelicate, almost masculine fist, stands in contrast with the rest of her, and gives the image its drama.
Such contrasts distinguish not only the exhibit’s selection but the portrait of Venice this grouping sketches. One leaves unsure of where La Serenissima’s values lie: Was the art and its advancements simply a byproduct of great wealth, examples of a highbrow form of conspicuous consumption accumulated by an elite whose main interest was power and wealth itself? Or was the power and wealth considered the means toward cultivating sensual luxuries, the least quantifiable of which are the pleasures in owning art? Perhaps that ambiguity is essential to Venice’s persona. One of the world’s loveliest cities, seminal to some of the most exquisite art and music of the Western canon, also coined the word ghetto, housed the first and most famous “bridge of sighs” (which connected the prison to the notoriously bloody interrogation rooms of the Doge’s palace), was the first state in Europe to employ a mercenary army, and built its empire on assassinations, backstabbing, and oppression. The convergence of the militaristic, sybaritic, and aesthetic might be the defining mystery of Venice itself, and Masters, as revelatory as it is, only deepens that mystery.
________ NOTES:
1. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, “Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power,” (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and DelMonico Books: Prestel, 2011), 29.
The Museum of Modern Art’s entire sixth floor is given over to this sprawling and deeply worthwhile exhibition of an American master curated by John Elderfield, with each of the seven rooms configured as an isolated chapter of a larger story. But the question is this: do the sum of these chapters tell us anything that we do not know? The show confirms that de Kooning was the most European, most expressionist, and least abstract of the American abstract expressionist painters, and the display of four distinct periods of figurative painting and one more of his troubling clamdigger series of bronze sculptures supports that story. So does the fact that almost none of his pre-1957 abstract works stray too far from the claustrophobic fussiness of Cubism-derived composition. For better and for worse, these are the salient attributes that distinguish his work from that of Jackson Pollock, de Kooning’s most abstract and least European supposed rival (keeping in mind that said rivalry was more a function of the competition between two critics, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, than it was of any contest between the two artists).
But something else becomes apparent when one strolls into the gallery devoted to what de Kooning was up to in the late 1960s and ’70s. Many of these paintings were previously presented at a Guggenheim Museum exhibition held in 1978 titled WillemDe Kooning in East Hampton. They show the artist taking virtuoso victory laps in stunning displays of bravura paint handling wedded to lustrous and baroque picture forms of the type seen in works like Montauk I (1969) or Whose Name Was Writ in Water (1975). Previous to that exhibition, de Kooning was the undisputed darling of every art critic of any import, and up until that point, no American artist (including Pollock) could claim to have equaled him in the receipt of unremittingly lavish praise. It is also worth remembering that these approbations were mirrored by legions of graduate painting students in the ’60s and ’70s, whose attempts at mirroring his signature wet-on-wet dragged brush technique were as widespread a cliché as the imitations of Gerhard Richter’s blurs are in our own moment. All of that would end in 1978, when Rosenberg and Thomas Hess, two major critics who had been de Kooning’s supporters, suddenly died, leading others to short his stock by proclaiming that the work of the then seventy-five-year-old artist was showing signs of exhaustion and faltering focus. For the record, I would like to say here that this shift in critical opinion was about seven years ahead of itself. But let’s get back to examining the nature of the victory and self-vindication celebrated by these first twelve years of the East
Montauk I, 1969; oil on canvas; 88 x 77 in. Courtesy of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT.
Two Women with Still Life, 1952; pastel on paper; 22 1/2 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Hampton paintings, because that’s where the real story lives. The victory of which I write was over the psychological damage that was done by the artist’s mother, and given the fact that de Kooning was unable to control his alcoholism until after he was eighty-one, it may have only been a victory of the Pyrrhic type.
I mean this quite seriously. According to biographical testimony given by de Kooning’s sister, the artist’s early childhood in north Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, was marred by privation and a frustrated mother who had a sadistic zeal for excesses of corporal punishment (is there a Dr. Freud in the house?).1 We also know that he matched his decades of alcoholism with much philandering, as if he was always seeking a new version of la femme enfant to provide a reassuringly worshipful antidote to the frightening specter of maternal menace that haunted his psyche like a great white whale.
It is the power of that haunting that interests us, and we see it in all four series of work that address the archetypal theme of woman, with very special emphasis placed on the third series of six that were painted between 1950 and 1953, when they were exhibited as a memorable group at the Sidney Janis Gallery. These are de Kooning’s most famous works, and each is an image of deep primordial terror. In all of them, one sees massive female figures sporting shark-toothed sneers and large eyes filled with predatory glee, all formed out of interlocking layers of thick and undulate slatherings of grimy oil paint. Less than a decade earlier, de Kooning began the first series of such works around the time he married the youthful Elaine de Kooning (née Fried), posing their slender sitters as wide-eyed innocents amid crisp arabesques of pink and turquoise. The fact that their marriage ended around 1950 might serve as partial explanation for the more fearsome later works, but the best way to see all four series is as a sequence of moments capturing a she-demon coming to the surface of consciousness, finally exploding through the picture plane to be reformed as the lump-like bronze sculptures that he made from 1968 to 1973, all of which look like piles of quasi-animate excrement. De Kooning’s emotional shit had finally been externalized and exorcised, allowing him to bring all of his considerable talents to paint with an unencumbered freedom. That freedom is seen in the aforementioned East Hampton paintings made from 1964 to 1979, and it ended about 1981.
There are two rooms devoted to de Kooning’s controversial late works, and as sad as they are, they too are part of the story. Large and colorful, these paintings are but a few of the over two hundred works that came out of his studio in those few years leading up to the artist being declared mentally incompetent in 1989 (he died in 1997). The cynical stench of financially motivated overproduction is everywhere to be seen in these unfocused gesticulations of contrived chromaticism and empty pseudospontaneity. They seem to put to rest malicious art world gossip pointing at an Alzheimer’s-afflicted artist manipulated into fits of ambient mark-making just to keep the lucrative game going a little bit longer. Thus was the whimper that was de Kooning’s end.
de Kooning: A Retrospective is on view at The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, through January 9, 2012.
________ NOTES:
1. For biographical information about de Kooning, see Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s De Kooning: An American Master (New York: Random House, 2004).
The title of Geof Oppenheimer’s solo exhibition at Ratio 3 creates an expectation of the artist’s engagement with self-conflicting, hidden compulsions. In fact, the show’s prints, sculptures, and video address the confluence of political verbiage, violence, and the hollowness of nationalism with varying degrees of success. The three groups of works support one another by providing context; the prints and sculptures in the main room, for example, gain much when viewed with the video’s soundtrack playing in the background. But when each group of works is viewed individually, it sometimes falls short of Oppenheimer’s stated intention to interrogate “the ways in which political and social structures are encoded in images and objects.”1
On the walls of the main space are the five black-and-white pigment prints of Social Failure and Black Signs (2010). In each photo, a smooth, graceful hand holds up a black card with white text. The phrases on the cards are forceful but opaque. “TOLERATED, AS UNFORTUNATE EXCESSES,” reads one card, while another asserts, “EVERYTHING, BUT IT’S NOT ENOUGH.” These phrases are quotes from interviews with various political figures from Castro to Reagan discussing their ideological failures. The form of the black card, its position aloft, and the text’s implied meanings all work together to position the prints as documentations of protest. Yet the force of demonstration is contradicted by the gentle, elegant grip on the cleanly printed card. Whatever raw energy the words conjure for the redress of grievances is dampened by the poise and domestication of the materials and composition.
In the center of the floor are Modern Ensembles (2010–11), three colorful sculptures made of gunpowder, blackpowder, and smoke dyes detonated inside transparent ballistic plexiglass boxes. Each flawlessly constructed cube is fairly large—around twenty inches in every dimension—and mounted on a footed aluminum base set atop a white pedestal. When Oppenheimer and a former Disney pyrotechnician ignited the volatile chemicals enclosed in the boxes, residue from the discharged powders coated the inside of the plexiglass with soft pink, orange, blue, mauve, and brown splatters. The hues of the exploded materials blend into one another to make lightly marbled patterns across the interior surface of the box, punctuated by small bursts of
Inside us all there is a part that would like to burn down our own house, 2011; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.
Anthems, 2011; high-definition video; TRT:4:40. Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.
sharper colors such as yellow and black. The work avoids many common clichés of art that explores conflict (particularly the tendency toward maudlin gestures), but the sweetly attractive colors and immaculate construction contradict the forcefulness of true violence, which often has ugly, ill-defined parameters. The scale and tidiness of Modern Ensembles mimic vitrines—devices for civilized viewing. That reference turns their interior chaos into a spectator’s version of violence, a signifier both produced and witnessed from a privileged, and even academic, remove.
The video in the back room isn’t marred by such reserved mannerliness. Anthems (2011) is a four-minute HD video of actors portraying a military marching band, interspersed with shots of a stark, minimal stage, and a soundtrack of four different national anthems. Most of the footage is of young men in khaki uniforms, marching in small formations across frames that are edited in transparent layers. They come and go across the screen, simultaneously walking toward and away from viewers. The shots are filmed from different angles, which results in a mildly dizzying effect when coupled with the multiplicity of actors in the overlaid frames. The musicians are only miming their roles, however: as they raise trumpets and horns to their faces, the mouthpieces barely touch their lips and their cheeks fail to inflate with air. Viewers can hear crashing cymbals, but never see them onscreen. There is a gap between what the music proposes and what the visuals portray, and it is precisely this space that Anthems invites viewers to contemplate. Dark shots of a minimal stage set that is composed of a propped door and a pair of three-step plywood staircases heighten the slippage. Sometimes the stairs are stacked, with interlocking treads and risers that create a precarious whole leading neither up nor down. The shots of the stage set work well with the exaggerated portrayal of lockstep nationalism, amplifying the video’s focus on theatricality and spectatorship. Eventually the music builds to a crashing, blaring crescendo that breaks into silence, while the video whites out into blankness before the credits roll.
In each of the three parts of the exhibition, Oppenheimer brings an idea into conjunction with its opposite: strong political statements by men softened by clean, feminine articulation; the violence of explosions counteracted by pleasurable swirls of color encased in immaculate chambers; the chest-thumping pride of a national anthem mocked with a theater set and blurred into incoherence. But it is only in the last that the drama of the presentation fully meets the weighty concept behind it. Though Oppenheimer is able to provoke the viewer with the title of the show, it’s clear that the part of us that would like to burn down our own house is a more anarchic creature than the one proposed here.
Inside us all there is a part that would like to burn down our own house is on view at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, through December 10, 2011.
The whole of all the parts as well as the part of all the parts is a solo project by Los Angeles–based artist Frances Stark curated by Sandra Percival of the contemporary art space YU in Portland. It is a cinematic installation that explores the layered meanings of performance and technology, the creative process, and the mediation of personal and artistic experience.
It consists of a single installation that is divided into eight video segments, totaling fifty-three minutes in length, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. The museum is divided accordingly into eight smaller galleries, with the walls acting as projection screens and partitions. The piece begins every hour, on the hour; lights go down, and the first video is projected onto the wall closest to the museum entrance. At the end of the first segment, a giant arrow flashes on the screen, pointing visitors to the next gallery where another video immediately begins. Stark choreographs our movement through the space, and the piece progresses like this until viewers have traveled to the far end of the museum. Some rooms have benches and others don’t, so even the position of viewers at rest is predetermined.
The videos combine text, music, a clip from Fellini’s 8 ½, and video footage of an experimental opera Stark performed at the Aspen Opera House in 2010. Aside from this footage, the only figures that appear are computer-generated: one male and one female figure created in the program Xtranormal, clad in white briefs and Adam and Eve–style leaves respectively. The characters are never named, though we come to understand the woman as Stark herself. She uses the avatars’ not-quite-human voices to heighten our sense of technology-mediated humanity—an idea that permeates the piece and holds it all together.
The problem of authorship also serves as a thread through Stark’s work. She layers other people’s music on top of her own words, filtering them through a computer program made by someone else. In one of the most entertaining moments of the piece, the audio morphs into a kind of stream-of-text musical set to an upbeat, rhythmic soundtrack, and a line appears on screen that echoes this longing for originality, as if the piece itself yearns to be authentic: “Oh to be as sound as a song not simply flat and half as long.”
Much of the whole of all the parts ruminates on the difficulty of being an artist—the internal pressures inherent in the act of creation, the impossibility of originality, the anxiety of writer’s block, and the particular stress of being a “professional” artist. The computerized voiceover that introduces the first video primes us with some stream-of-consciousness agonizing of this ilk. Stark worries that she may be “losing the ability to write.” This feels a bit like the introductory sentence of a short story in its first draft, one that provides essential momentum but is likely to get lopped off in the revision stage.
The whole of all the parts and the parts of all the parts, 2011; installation view, Mills College Art Museum, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist and Mills College Art Museum. Photo: Phil Bond.
The whole of all the parts and the parts of all the parts, 2011; installation view, Mills College Art Museum, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist and Mills College Art Museum. Photo: Phil Bond.
And maybe this was the point, for Stark: to combine both the finished and messy bits of a work, the whole of all the parts and the parts of all the parts, even those that seem redundant or preliminary. This is one way to expose the circuitous process of making art. The computer-voice declares, “I cannot tell anyone how all these parts and parts of parts will add up.”
By far the most engrossing parts of the piece occurred in the latter half, featuring flirtatious online chat sessions between an anonymous man and woman. These conversations are not only the source of the work’s central narrative, comprising a compelling drama that unfolds over time, but also the synthesis of its most poignant ideas that are obliquely hinted at elsewhere. Their words pop up on screen in turn and distinguished by two different fonts. Over time, it becomes clear that the woman is Stark, and the man is an Italian architect whom she has never met in person.
In one conversation, Stark compares being an artist to being a sex worker; there is always a “pressure to get it on.” Stark is able to express her own fears and innermost thoughts about art, sex, and intimacy to (and through) this stranger. At another point, the Italian suggests that they should never meet in person because they are too alike. For both of them, “nothing is enough.” This phrase stuck with me, resonating like some kind of Zen proverb. Does it imply that they are never satisfied? Or that the most minimal human contact—next to nothing—is, itself, enough?
The relationship between Stark and the architect is interesting on two levels. There is an obvious strangeness to knowing someone across the world only through instant messaging, creating the illusion of closeness through the remove of technology. But more interesting is that this medium allows viewers, as voyeuristic audience, to witness an intimate exchange in a way that wouldn’t be possible through any other means. I came to understand the Internet as an ironic enabler of intimacy, both for Stark and her mystery man, and for viewers as their audience.
When the lights come up, the question of how all the parts, and parts of parts, add up (or don’t) lingers. Experiencing the work is perhaps reflective of the process of its making: it is disjointed and disorganized, leaving many threads unstitched. The wall text informs us that the whole of all the parts…was punctuated with a “finale” at Performa 11 in New York this November. Part of the opera created for the Aspen Opera House was also revised and given another life as a performance titled I’ve had it and a half! at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles earlier this year. Understanding the way Stark recycles, revises, and extends the life of her work is crucial to her process as an artist: for her, art is by definition always unfinished, always reflecting back on itself and finding new life. This is a messy process. But for all its conceptual loose ends, Stark’s work feels genuine precisely because it is messy. She is always working through these questions: How do we make anything original? Why make art at all? How is experience translated through space, time, and medium? What constitutes performance? These questions lead to more questions, which, like the life of her work, simultaneously reach back into the past and forward into the future.
The whole of all the parts as well as the part of all the parts is on view at the Mills College Art Museum, in Oakland, through December 11, 2011.
The night after Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen was assaulted by police in their raid on Occupy Oakland, the art historian Julian Myers presented Corrected Slogans at Kadist Art Foundation. Taking its title from a 1975 album produced in collaboration between the collective Art & Language (A&L) and the band Red Krayola (RK), Corrected Slogans staged new collaborations: first, with the collective Claire Fontaine (CF), and then with the artist Natasha Wheat and musician Jim Fairchild. Myers and Claire Fontaine selected CF’s 2005 work, Requiem for Jean-Charles de Menezes—based on the assassination of a Brazilian immigrant by the London police, who mistook him for a terrorist—and invited Wheat and Fairchild to interpret it as they chose. The resulting event included Wheat and Fairchild performing the songs they created from the text of Requiem and a conversation between Myers, Wheat, Fairchild, and the audience about the histories, conditions, and forms of the numerous collaborations this project entails.
Below is an abridged and edited version of my subsequent email exchange with Myers and Wheat reexamining that evening, along with videos of both the performance and the discussion that followed. The decision to use a dialogic approach for a review followed from the evening’s discussion and from the collaborative and investigative nature of the project at its center. What became of interest to me was the consideration of how any form of engagement proposes its own risks and limitations.
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Patricia Maloney: At the event, you resisted the title of curator, instead framing the presentation as a form of art historical research rather than as a realized project. Did that resistance preclude the possibility for failure?
Julian Myers: I don’t believe so. I am an art historian; how I think, speak, and write about an artwork, how I research it, all necessarily evolve from the history of art’s body of knowledge and in complex, often critical relationship to it. Curatorial practice is an adjacent discipline and increasingly has its own specializations, methods, and forms of thought.
I posed Corrected Slogans as a form of “heuristic research,” a term I drew from the discourse of A&L themselves. Referring to art students’ activity in the studio, it means, simply, learning through speculation, experiment, and trial and error. How might such techniques be brought to bear in my own area of competence? That this mode of working necessarily includes the potential for failure is obvious—as is the necessity of a critical thinking-through of each “trial.” But one also needs to decide the question of criteria here: “fail,” according to what standard or measure? Does the value of anything (any politics) really play out along such yes/no, fail/succeed binaries? That is really a parody of judgment.
Jim Fairchild and Natasha Wheat performing at the Kadist Art Foundation, in San Francisco, October 26, 2011.
PM: My question about curatorship was essentially a query into your motivations for bringing this research to an audience—to bring the speculative, experimental, maybe-it- will-fall-apart approach into full public view. Did you have expectations for how the audience would receive the performance and/or the larger research project?
JM: I didn’t, except I hoped, as I always do, that those present would attend to the material at hand with good will, critical attentiveness, and a willingness to engage discursively. Nor did I make many proscriptions for what Jim and Natasha might perform.
I did, however, have a specific ambition for the Requiem piece. In our planning for the event, I said to CF that, “our aim is for the words and the work to retain as much force as we can give them. [We see this as] one possible way (through repetition) to inscribe them more deeply.”
PM: Natasha, can you say something about how you approached the CF work?
Natasha Wheat: Although the songs that Jim and I made have lyrics that are taken from an artist’s text, they are ultimately songs. Music is often direct and impulsive, and benefits from being left that way. That is how I believe it has survived the partial castration that art continuously undergoes through being consumed by the academy. Thank whatever god or possibly a lack of ability to be contained by the cognitive for musicians not getting MFAs or PhDs in rock ’n’ roll.
I found it intrepid of Julian to commission songs as a form of investigation into his overarching research. This instigates something rather than only assuming. Although these were songs and clearly not performance art, I believe that Peggy Phelan’s notion that “performance’s only life is in the present” is transcendent and that it then becomes very messy to attempt to explain a process or postulate about what has occurred. This difficulty is also heightened in the direct presence of the work.
PM: I admire the risk in setting up a series of experiments and allowing them to unfold—the result being this multivalent event that invites the audience to forge allegiances with one element or another, or a few, or several. But, Julian, what you describe as a parody of judgment, I perceive as allowing for those allegiances to manifest.
I’m not using the term allegiance lightly. I experienced a significant disconnect between the performance and the conversation; they encouraged radically different perceptions of the evening’s purpose. I was compelled by your gesture to Natasha and Jim to activate the language. That gesture was powerful. As Natasha describes above, it produced the affect of being present in the work. It followed from the pragmatic notion that ideas produce their clarity by the impact of their actions.
Art & Language. Singing Man, 1975 from Corrected Slogans 1; silkscreen and liquitex on newsprint; 76 x 61 inches. Courtesy of Julian Myers.
PM (con't): But none of the energy or urgency of the poem that Natasha and Jim’s performance conveyed carried over to the conversation beyond your initial impassioned introduction. The esoteric and tedious turns the conversation took suggest that the translation of the Requiem succeeded in one form but failed in another. The conversation didn’t allow the words (both CF’s and A&L’s) to retain their force.
JM: Can this “forcefulness” not take multiple forms and temporalities? What CF produced was not a political speech, exactly, but a political speech as a work of art, and that adds layers that need to be unfolded—and perhaps that unfolding demands a different mood than exhortation. Historical and geographical distance matters here as well: the Requiem’s date is 2005, and the charge the piece had then is necessarily different from the resonance it might have now. Does that difference make repetition (naming, remembering) any less worthwhile?
Jim and Natasha’s contribution added further layers of repetition and of distance, extrapolation, and reflection. My proposal for the event was simple enough, but the elaboration of the work itself introduced unforeseen complications and alienations. As Natasha said during the event, she didn’t always agree with the words she was singing. And for me, the extreme helplessness I felt in 2005, after the invasion of Iraq and the re- election of George W. Bush, feel very far away to me now as capitalism sways and protest seems to find purchase in Tahrir Square, Frank Ogawa Plaza, and elsewhere.
To your question about allegiance: don’t solidarity and allegiance almost of necessity come along with complications and alienation? I think Corrected Slogans (the album) is (in part) a musical drama about just that.
PM: I agree with you that the geographic and temporal distance of both A&L collaborations with RK’s and CF’s work are further dislocated by current events, and that such dislocation merits the repetition. But whereas you may have anticipated the complications and alienations from the enactment, I am a bit unnerved that my position as a participant in the conversation produced that alienation. Or maybe more precisely that, in the analysis, I felt removed from the political agency that was the subject of both CF’s work and the Corrected Slogans album.
Research can necessitate an open-ended, even meandering course of exploration, and research in general would suggest a detachment from the type of urgency this work extols. But the conversation and reflections had no correspondence to the fact that we are operating in a moment of very visible individual political agency. It reinforced the notion that artistic production occurs only in a limited sphere.
Maybe my resistance came from as simple a fact as the evening beginning with music performed. Performances and lectures have radically different rituals that inscribe expectations for the role one plays. I am intrigued by the idea that conflating rituals breaks open such expectations, and I am trying to use my frustration with the evening to explore that.
Julian Myers presenting Corrected Slogans at the Kadist Art Foundation, in San Francisco, October 26, 2011.
JM: I understand the difficulties you and Natasha have marked. But I think the remove and the sense of impotence is there in Corrected Slogans and in the Requiem. We just followed it along. This might be what makes their gestures feel foreign to us now. The years 1975 and 2005 were dismal moments, hopeless moments. Maybe ours isn’t, or at least not in the same way.
For what it’s worth, though, I didn’t understand the event as agitprop—even though various aspects of the presentation reference agitprop, from CF’s Requiem to Jim and Natasha’s punk idiom to the Corrected Slogans album. I thought that the event was equally about composition, collaboration, and form. These were the places where revelations came for me in the discussion. How do groups produce art or music together, and to what end? I had this realization on stage, as it were, after playing “Plekhanov” [from the album] for the crowd. “The crucial question is that of groups,” I said, “the political vanguard, the artistic avant-garde, and the psychedelic rock group, and their different, mutual promises of emancipation—whose potential, by 1975, had all seemed to have vanished from the earth.” That perhaps modest realization is where the research and discussion led.
Corrected Slogans was presented at the Kadist Art Foundation, in San Francisco, on October 26, 2011.
As part of our ongoing partnership withDaily Serving, Art Practical is republishing Allie Haeusslein’s article “Chris McCaw-Ride Into the Sun,” on Chris McCaw’s solo show at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, which you can also read here atDaily Serving.
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In the 1960s, the Italian artist Lucio Fontana created Concetto Spaziale, a series of paintings that challenged established notions of the pictorial plane by slashing and poking holes in the canvas. Fontana explained, “I make a hole in a canvas in order to leave behind the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art, and I escape, symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface.” Visiting Ride Into the Sun, Chris McCaw’s new exhibition at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, I could not help but compare the striking gesturalism punctuating McCaw’s photographs to Fontana’s. Aside from the evident formal similarity in the two artists’ works, it is interesting to note how both respond to the changes wrought by technology, despite their use of different materials and the forty years dividing their practices. Impressed by the dawn of the space age, Fontana felt strongly that art should dynamically alter the space by which it was defined, an interest that led him to try and combine architecture, sculpture, and painting into a new aesthetic language. In an era when analog photography is languishing on the heels of perpetual innovations in the field of digital technology, McCaw’s use of traditional photographic materials to unparalleled effect suggests that perhaps we have prematurely discounted the potential of these tools.
These photographs are produced through an elaborate process that relies on both calculated finesse and unadulterated chance. McCaw works with various hand-built view cameras of sizes up to thirty by forty inches, which are equipped with vintage military optics designed to let in a lot of light. Rather than using film negatives, he shoots directly onto a variety of expired silver gelatin papers, a decision that further highlights the sense of immediacy intrinsic to this work. Extended exposures ranging
Sunburned GSP#420 (Arctic Circle, Alaska), 2010; unique gelatin silver paper negative; 12 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco.
Sunburned GSP#493 (Sierras), 2011; unique gelatin silver paper negative; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco.
from several hours to a full twenty-four-hour period overexpose the photographic paper, resulting in an effect called solarization—a reversal of tonality due to excessive light.
Additionally, the concentrated strength of the sun entering the camera can literally burn the surface of the paper, resulting in beautiful marks that embody both fragility and brute force, or creation and destruction. The remarkable control evinced in these photographs is a testament to McCaw’s meticulous refinement of this process over the past eight years. While the sun may be considered a collaborator in this process, his sophisticated understanding of materials and environment is evident in the controlled, wide-ranging results: from singular, precise crescents to ostensibly violent gashes. Beautiful wisps of orange peek through the dark background and feather the bold lacerations in Sunburned GSP#467 (Full day/Puget Sound, WA) (2011), a consequence of the gelatin in the paper literally being cooked. Yet despite the complexity of this approach, McCaw’s photographs retain a beautiful sense of effortlessness and quietude, resulting in an elegant amalgam of abstraction and landscape.
The significance of time and place in these photographs cannot be discounted. A number of the works in this exhibition were taken during two recent trips to the Arctic Circle during the summer when daylight lasts twenty-four hours. Sunburned GSP#485 (North Slope Alaska/24 hours) (2011) is a seamlessly stitched together sequence of fourteen prints that map the sun’s undulating path across the horizon with only a subtle nod to the landscape through the faint impression of mountains. With just the information conveyed by the sun’s angle and its trace on the paper, in conjunction with minimal indicators of environment, one can garner a sense of where and when the photograph is made. At the same time, these works engage with more conceptually-driven notions of the immensity of the universe and the Infinite, a concern shared by Fontana, who stated, “the discovery of the Cosmos is a new dimension, it is the Infinite: so I make a hole in the canvas, which is the basis for all previous art, to search for an infinite dimension.” McCaw’s work offers a lens through which to consider these interests in the context of the twenty-first century society.
Chris McCaw: Ride Into the Sun is on view at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, in San Francisco, through December 22, 2011.
Albert Oehlen has been making meaty abstract paintings and pop-tinged collages for decades. In his solo show Painthing On the Möve,at Corbett vs. Dempsey, neither one makes an appearance. The works on view here are a series of variations on an abstract graphic armature.
Despite the layers of irony wrapped around the title, Painthing On the Möve seems an apt name for an Oehlen show; throughout the artist’s prolific career, his work has rarely stood still for very long. While most of Oehlen’s past images have featured a frenetic density of visual information, the two large paintings and ten smaller works on paper at Corbett vs. Dempsey are comparatively understated. These sparse compositions consist mostly of black lines on white or dichromatic picture planes. The images bear comparison with the artist’s series of “computer paintings” created in the 1990s using early computer graphics programs that yielded highly pixilated lines and shapes. The work presented here, however, employs no such technological mediation, relying instead on charcoal, pencil, and paint on paper or canvas.
Amongst the twelve pieces assembled at Corbett vs. Dempsey, stylistic similarities, parallel rhythms, and recurring motifs—as well as the emphasis on linear mark-making and near absence of color—create a uniformity that some viewers may find a little dull. Hip, beautiful, emotive: these are not words that readily come to mind when describing Oehlen’s work. Rather, it has an academic quality. There is wit, too, but it’s subtle and dry as a bone. These works demand some brainwork and perhaps require a pre-established appreciation of abstraction from their audience.
The show’s esoteric nature is partly derived from its inspiration: the work of improvisational jazz conductor Lawrence “Butch” Morris. Like jazz improvisation, Oehlen’s work combines a variety of linear structures in order to create abstract compositions. It is a challenge to write descriptively about those structures and the ways in which the different pieces relate to one another because of the narrow set of parameters Oehlen works from. The fact that only Conduction 4 (2010) and Conduction 11 (2011), the two larger paintings named after Morris’ “Conduction” musical series, are titled adds to this challenge. I will largely forgo the mind-numbing exercise of descriptive citation so as not to confuse the eight untitled works (all from 2010) and speak more generally about common themes.
Conduction 11, 2011; charcoal and acrylic on canvas; 82.75 x 106.25 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago.
Untitled, 2010; paper, ink, and pencil on paper; 10.25 x 8.25 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey.
The smaller works on paper contain their own unique characteristics, but they are more dynamic when viewed as part of a broader exploration. Like one of Morris’ jazz performances, Oehlen’s works on paper deal with layering and collage. These effects are unassuming. In many of the pieces, three or four fragments of drawings are pasted side by side. Lines that begin in one section are connected to marks made in another section. In some places this process creates grids, while in others it is simply a device for merging the fragments together. The effect is a fluid and seamless integration of subtly different parts. Line width is another technique used to create layering: darker, heavier lines appear to come forward while thinner lines recede, producing an illusion of depth. And line variation is used to mimic certain optical art effects, where the repetition of closely spaced wavy lines suggests topographies and light gradations, as in Conduction 11. These devices are used sparingly, just another visual resource for Oehlen to mash together in a heap of graphic systems.
The tension between abstraction and representation is a key element to these works. Some lines are gestural and meandering, but almost all are thin and precise. Some lines form grids that look like architectural plans; others begin to coalesce into recognizable signs, symbols, letters, and likenesses without ever reaching full development. Oehlen seems to be approaching modernist questions through a postmodern lens; his work has a semiotic quality to it, but Oehlen’s marks never quite materialize into signs. Every aspect of his collages that appears to be a hard-and-fast rule is brilliantly upended. The artist’s exploration in this series may not be very broad, but it is certainly deep.
And ultimately that is what this collection of work seems to be: a lesson in creative exploration within given limits. It isn’t particularly dynamic, but it’s not trying to be. It is the material evidence of a creative individual working through a series of questions, like sketching. But just when a stable explanation for the works seems to emerge, they reveal themselves to be something else.
Painthing On the Möve will be on view at Corbett vs. Dempsey, in Chicago, through December 3, 2011.
Faye Driscoll is a fearless choreographer: young, smart, and intensely creative. In an October 29, 2011, performance with Jesse Zaritt at CounterPULSE, Driscoll presented parts of an unfinished duet called Not... Not, which has been commissioned by the Kitchen and is set to premiere in April 2012. Conflicting selves—and conflicting desires—instigate, inhabit, and complicate the interactions of the dancers. Driscoll's work perfectly blends somatic and conceptual explorations, and inspires the questions: For whom do we perform? And are we ever not performing?
Driscoll's work calls to mind Richard Schechner's famous description of multiple selves coexisting in an unresolved dialectical tension.1 Different states of being transform the performers' bodies; torsos, limbs, and faces appear pulled by needs and wants. Their interactions range from playful to distant to aggressive. Driscoll, in one of the more animalistic and jarring scenes, grunts at Zaritt with a bundle of rope stuffed in her mouth. Other times she is grace personified, executing a phrase of low arabesques like a skater gliding on ice. Zaritt elicits laughter when he poses like a bodybuilder; his muscles are as chiseled as a statue of Adonis. When their bodies intertwine, Driscoll glances at the audience over her shoulder, as if checking on us. For the duration of Not... Not, roles, identities, and feelings continually emerge and liquefy: causal relationships between action and reaction, doing and watching trigger thoughts about display and reciprocity, expectations and posturing, posing and craving.
After forty minutes of material, Driscoll joined CounterPULSE director Jessica Robinson Love on stage. The ensuing conversation revealed how alongside a diversity of approaches to dance by artists today, there are varying degrees of engagement offered to audiences. Even though post-performance discussions have become a common technique for generating feedback, their efficacy varies depending on context and structure. Shannon Jackson writes about the "conversational stall" that can occur in these settings, describing them as "misfires where the ever-sought hope for artist-scholar exchange is ever deferred."2 Talks can disintegrate into awkward exchanges of words that dampen an experience that was originally intimate and visceral; attempts to resolve conflicting points of view or explain intent can end up muddling the impact of images and ideas.
Not... Not, 2011 (still); performance, CounterPULSE, San Francisco, October 29, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Ian Douglass.
Not... Not, 2011; performance, CounterPULSE, San Francisco, October 29, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Christopher Duggan.
But CounterPULSE transforms such moments of frustration into illumination by flipping the post-performance structure: instead of encouraging the audience to probe the artist's process, the artist presents questions and solicits feedback from the audience. After the showing of Not... Not, Driscoll's questions for the audience included, "What story did you tell yourself about what was happening on stage?" Surprisingly, the theater remained full during this discussion section, and audience members were not only invested in Driscoll's process but also responding to comments from one another. People spoke about ways the duet disrupted, challenged, and exposed ideas about masculinity and femininity. Others talked about the vulnerability of intimacy, the dissolving of emotions, the resurfacing of primordial instincts, and the possibility for a "beautiful ugly." Driscoll added that this work began with a desire to explore her own ideas about beauty. When the hour-long formal discussion ended, audience members lingered to talk in small groups.
This type of post-performance discussion may not successfully happen often, but perhaps it may not need to. Some performances are presented as completed projects, and post-performance talks elucidate paths that have served to bring an artist's work to fruition. What Driscoll offered, both in her choreographic material and the exchange that followed, was a chance to see performance as an integral part of interaction and conversation. Dialogue emerged among strangers, propositions were presented and developed, people engaged with one another to share and discuss points of view. Even if it makes sense for structures that support artists to evolve as the artists' works develop, it's rare to find organizations as adaptable, flexible, and open to change as the artists themselves.
Faye Driscoll: Work in Progress Showing was on view at CounterPULSE, in San Francisco, on October 29, 2011.
________ NOTES:
1. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 6.
2. Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 111.
One of the most iconic images of the Great Depression is a photograph known as Migrant Mother (1936). Dorothea Lange’s portrait, which is currently on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts as part of the group show More American Photographs, shows a woman hemmed in by her three small children, her hand at her face in a gesture that is at once tender, absent-minded, and deeply troubled. The original caption given to the Library of Congress to accompany the image is “Destitute Peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children, February 1936.” The project from which this image arose was an effort of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which assigned photographers to “document continuity and change in many aspects of life in America” from 1935 to 1944.1 A style of documentary photography emerged within this group of images that has proven an indelible influence on subsequent generations. Photographers working in the twentieth century, including Robert Frank and, later, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and William Eggleston, would embody “a version of art photography derived from the vocabulary of photojournalism rather than that of painting.”2
As our country struggles with the most depressed economy since the Great Depression, the Wattis has created a kind of remake of the FSA’s project, and to haunting effect. The original FSA photographs presented at the Wattis are in elegant groupings: inkjet prints from the archives of the Library of Congress arranged at the center of the two rooms on the Wattis’ lower level. Walker Evans’ images from a long-passed day, such as General Store Interior, Moundville, Alabama (1936), deliver both the poeticism of abstract painting and the incredible detail of a hard-won photograph taken on large-format film with a camera that is as much a relic as the wood floors it depicts. Hung on the perimeter walls of each exhibition room—and seemingly gazing inward at their forbearers—are the images that comprise director Jens Hoffmann’s re-creation of the FSA project. The journey of photographic art from analog to the current digital formats is evident in this juxtaposition of original works with the new commissions.
In the past year, a dozen commissioned photographers embarked on their own photographic journey, creating an essay in images and capturing the plight and the humanity of our country during this Great Recession. This group of image makers reexamines the separation of photography and photojournalism, armed with a script identical to the one provided by Roy Stryker to his initial cast of artists in the 1930s, wherein Stryker described the kinds of images he wanted to see. Hoffmann’s commission letter implores the artists in More American Photography to create with compassion; he confesses trust in their abilities, and his narrative adds poignancy and intimacy to one of the most quietly affecting shows the Wattis has assembled to date.
Stryker meant for the original FSA photographers to document the cash loans made to farmers by the Resettlement Administration (RA)—loans that were essentially meant to provide the means for 650,000 farmers to relocate to more fertile land, restart their lives, and invigorate the economy by creating new communities.
John Vachon. National Association of Manufacturers sign, Dubuque, Iowa, 1940; inkjet print; 10 x 8 in. Courtesy the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Katy Grannan. Untitled, Bakersfield, California, 2011; archival pigment print; 29 x 39 in. Courtesy the Artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
But the RA was successful in moving only several thousand people and building a small handful of greenbelt cities that “planners admired as models for a cooperative future that never arrived.”3 Garbage foragers in John Vachon’s 1940 photograph Foraging for food in the city dump, Dubuque, Iowa call to mind the scavengers that currently populate countless San Francisco streets. The compelling vignettes of Martha Rosler’s Greenpoint, Brooklyn explorations are tableaux of the transformation she has witnessed in her own community. She captures the distinctions of her neighborhood with a great deal of warmth and humor through images and text, such as in EAT, Abdul, 3Decker (2011). As both sets of photographs attest, the camera can be an equalizing force in a community, rendering flatly the lives of others whether rich or poor.
Though on a smaller scale than originally intended, the efforts of the RA to relocate migrant farmers and create so-called lands of opportunity nevertheless invoked waves of xenophobia in the citizens affected by incoming migrants, not unlike the immigration battles being waged in many states today. Many of the FSA images document the segregation of the 1930s and ’40s, often utilizing signage to make a point. Populations meant to be unseen—Americans being herded and shuffled according to their designation of “colored” or “Negro”—walk alongside signs touting the “world’s highest standard of living” in Arthur Rothstein’s Sign, Birmingham, Alabama (1937). In the new set of photographs, the sign of our times always seems to be For Sale in one form or another. Catherine Opie’s shopkeepers, such as in Rita, (Pupuseria) (2011), gaze starkly out from large-scale color prints, blithely waiting for their next stimulus. Katy Grannan’s California-based portraits depict a similar quiet desperation, giving no indication of the figures’ occupations.
As Congress essentially put an end to the efforts of the RA by combining the agency with the FSA, the tenor of pseudo-patriotic backlash in the face of this overly socialistic endeavor has an all too familiar ring to it. What is haunting about the images on view at the Wattis—and the premise of the curatorial decision to group the two projects—is the resounding echo of economic instability, political posturing, and stagnation. Even in its title, More American Photographs gives an eerie feeling of history repeating itself: a déjà-vu of resignation and defeat. As a modern day Stryker, Hoffmann implores his artists to ask, “What does the recession mean to Americans?” Today, the photographers seem to answer with what it means not only to Americans, but also to the practice of photography in a world that feels as if it could move forward, if only we weren’t still so stuck.
1. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Prints and Photographs Reading Room. “Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination: Documentation by Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photographers.” http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/085_disc.html
2. Russell Ferguson, Open City: Possibilities of the Street (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 10.
As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is republishing Julie Henson's article "New Histories and Epic Tales: Better a Live Ass Than a Dead Lion at Eli Ridgway Gallery," which you can also read here at Daily Serving.
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Standing on a hillside gazing into the Pacific Ocean, one can’t help but to be overwhelmed by the beauty and ruggedness of the landscape. Rolling hills, steep cliffs, and thick forests bring to mind epic stories of western expansion and the conquering spirit of those who have traveled here, a spirit currently under investigation at Eli Ridgway Gallery. Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion brings together a group of San Francisco artists that restlessly explore our romance with both narrative and landscape alike, weaving together stories and dreams of uncharted lands and undiscovered peoples. The love for exploration needs no real truth here; each work presents a small part of a tale bound together by the love of the land.
When entering the room that houses Elisheva Biernoff’s Inheritance (2010), one’s eyes instantly begin to play tricks. Picturesque waterfalls and mountains go in and out of focus. Images dissolve and reconstruct themselves against a backdrop of fog, flashing in and out rhythmically with the subtle sound of the slide projector. Just as nineteenth-century photographer Carlton Watkin’s images create mythic space, Inheritance reinterprets fabricated lands at the edge of our perception. Encased in fog, the images rest on the verge of becoming clear, allowing memory to fill in where our vision can’t.
In the adjacent room, Biernoff’s small, hand-painted postcard replicas maintain the same level of mystery, mimicking reality with a delicate hand. Just as Inheritance bends one’s perception of the landscapes presented, Biernoff’s small paintings create mystery and myth around the stories of the American West through simple gestures. The small paintings, quaint and distinctive, lovingly memorialize commonplace memories and remind us of the postcards still living in a shoebox from our childhood vacation.
Lindsey White’s Observed in Salvation Mountain, Executed in New Haven, CT (2011), a beautifully awkward and uncomfortable image that seems “real” upon first glance, presents us with a similar quandry. With more investigation, Observed in Salvation Mountain, Executed in New Haven, CT becomes more and more mysterious. The figure is harshly arrested by his own clothing, caught in a moment of uncertainty. The raking perspective instantly draws one’s attention to what lies just outside the frame, allowing one’s own imagination to construct this character’s identity. Through the use of title, White playfully doubles the meaning of the word Execution—as it relates to both the subject’s
Elisheva Biernoff. Inheritance, 2010; eighty slides of endangered wilderness areas projected onto mist from a humidifier housed in a plywood and fabric enclosure. Courtesy of the Artist and Eli Ridgway Gallery, San Francisco.
Joshua Churchill. Trembling Void, 2011; site-specific installation with light and sound. Courtesy of the Artist and Eli Ridgway, San Francisco.
narrative and to the creation of the image—while introducing an alternative meaning to the photograph: place. The mention of Salvation Mountain and New Haven, two fundamentally different Connecticut locales, turns this image away from the character pictured and towards the recollection of a location. The act of recreating a memory from Salvation Mountain also calls into question the authenticity of the moment, bringing one to imagine a new face just outside the frame.
The same mysterious discovery occurs with Joshua Churchill’s project, Trembling Void (2011). The quiet sounds of equipment lies just outside of the room; a flickering light appears through a vent in the wall, which trembles and shakes. This simple and effective project reminds us how constructed the space of a gallery is. Churchill’s video project, Rise and Fall (2011), provides the same realization. A video of what appears to be a heavy blizzard rolls over and over, blown out by a harsh light. Given the mystery of Trembling Void, however, one can’t help but question the reality of the blizzard.
One of the most notable parts of this exhibition is sound. The quiet overwhelms the viewing experience, in the best possible sense, drawing attention to the subtle sounds of the work. Biernoff’s rhythmic slide projector hums quietly from the project space, and Churchill’s Trembling Void accentuates every other sound in the gallery. These projects ask each viewer to pay equal attention to the ambient sounds throughout the space. Matt Kennedy’s video It’s Come Down To This (2011), provides a similar experience. A small box in the center of the upstairs gallery calls the viewer over with the sound of rocks being raked back and forth across the ground. Peering into the structure, a simple video presents a shuffling foot in the process of creating these sounds. Reminiscent of a small child playing in the landscape, this approach to exploration returns the exhibition from lofty and romantic back to exploration through repetitive and mundane experience.
Although the show is extremely satisfying overall, the mystery, romance, and exploration throughout the work is tame. The risk and reward that is referenced in such a poetic introduction is found in small, intimate doses throughout the space. There is no one who has “suffered, starved, and triumphed” because of the explorative, romantic spirit presented by the exhibition text. Exploration is a dirty sport, and the work presented in Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion is successfully clean and romantic, and most notably—bound to image. More than anything, the photography in this exhibition seems to be the most one-note. The landscape photographs by Richard Misrach, Sean McFarland, and Dean Smith are even more romantic and picturesque in this context, which provides less depth compared to the other projects. One hopes that exploration has more worth than romance, and one thing that Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion could benefit from is diversity in scale and experimentation. Most projects present a satisfying and bite-sized relationship to a romance with exploration rather than exploration itself.
Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion is on view at Eli Ridgway Gallery, in San Francisco, through November 5, 2011.
Within minutes of arriving at the Frieze Art Fair and walking inside its cavernous tent staged in London's Regent's Park, I found myself in a small room packed with other fair-goers, sipping grape-flavored schnapps from a makeshift Romanian-themed bar and gawking at a muscular man in military gear pacing excitedly in the corner. Also in the room: the artist collective LuckyPDF, one of the fair’s commissioned projects, who were busily preparing an elaborate TV production set for a live broadcast of one of their daily performances.
Thoroughly confused but amused, I stayed to watch. An awkward amalgamation of absurdist theater and ultra-dry bathos ensued, involving an MC in a tomato costume, two hot young blondes apathetically playing drums and synthesizer on a Nam June Paik–styled TV-littered stage, and the aforementioned muscle man—British wrestler Tiny Iron, as it turned out—wrestling various bodies to the ground. I think there was a Japanese newscaster somewhere in there, too. Despite the impressive ambition of the group and the schnapps in my system, their media-savvy irony didn’t translate, so my attention waned and I left during Tiny Iron’s rampage.
That's the saving grace of an art fair: there is always something else to look at when you get bored. One hundred and seventy-three galleries from thirty-three different countries exhibited at Frieze this year, each of which showcased roughly a dozen pieces of art. There was every reason to be discriminating. If the Takashi Murakami sculpture at the Parisian Perrotin Gallery was too gaudy, there was a Robert Irwin neon around the corner, or a conceptual Rubik's Cube composed of plexiglass and cucumbers just a few rows down. But how intoxicating to have such a diverse array of visual goodies under the same roof! Viewers wandered around, their retinas loaded like revolvers, shooting stares at anything and anyone that attracted their attention.
The visual-speed-dating atmosphere of the fair mirrors that of a high-end shopping mall, where entertainment and socializing get conflated with retail. This results in an art fair
Installation view; Frieze Art Fair, London, 2011. Photo: Spencer Young.
Elmgreen & Dragset, The Fruit of Knowledge; installation view, Frieze Art Fair, 2011. Photo: Spencer Young.
that has less to do with the art and everything to do with the experience. Alongside those who appeared to be seriously considering new artworks for their collection were those who opted simply to poke their heads through an Ai Wei Wei, check their hair in an Anish Kapoor, and have their picture taken next to a Damien Hirst. This turned out to be deeply gratifying: interacting with art strictly on a superficial level, rather than pummeling it to death in search of meaning and content.
Late one evening, at the one art party I made it to, hosted by the Gagosian Gallery, I found myself peeing next to a certain Turner Prize–winning artist while in the men's bathroom, wherein I asked him where all the real, aka fun, parties were. Whoever is buying Christian Jankowski's much-buzzed-about The Finest Art on Water (2011)—the luxury yacht that could be purchased as a yacht for an exorbitant amount, or as a piece of art for an egregious amount—must at least be throwing a yacht party. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d avoid Frieze altogether. You’re better off going to Brixton.”
Locals gave me the same advice. The Frieze Art Fair used to be really glossy and fun, they’d say, but it’s really gone downhill this year. Despite these warnings, I kept going back. My routine was usually the same: I’d go to one of the Frieze Talks—the best of which was artist Franz Erhard Walther’s survey of his own conceptual works from the 1960s and ’70s—then wander the maze-like rows of the fair. When my body tired, I'd take a nap in the park. And when my eyes started to glaze, I'd find one of Gerhard Richter’s intensive color-striped digital prints and stare at it until the visual vibrations of the patterned lines reset my retinas back to normal.
Why I kept going back, I’m still not sure. Nothing spectacular was happening. I had seen all the art within the first couple of days, and two days was more than enough to soak everything in. Maybe it had something to do with all the well-heeled, good-looking Europeans, or the subtle complexities of the scene with its couched social hierarchies and implied celebrity status. Or maybe it was simply a natural extension of having spent so many similar days in shopping malls as a kid—mindlessly roaming the vanity hallways of America’s consumer culture.
The Frieze Art Fair took place in Regent’s Park, London, from October 13–16, 2011.
Bay Area conceptual artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson describes her multi-platform documentary project !Women Art Revolution (!W.A.R.) as “the remains of an insistent history that refuses to wait any longer to be told.” That history is primarily told through Hershman Leeson’s interviews over forty years with many of the most influential feminist artists, curators, and historians of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s: Judy Chicago, the Guerilla Girls, Suzanne Lacy and Judy Baca, Yvonne Rainer, Rachel Rosenthal, Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneeman, Nancy Spero, Marcia Tucker, and the list goes on. It is a history that encompasses war, identity politics, gender discrimination, sexuality, motherhood, and race.
!W.A.R. is at times a raw and uneven but ultimately moving and always deeply personal account of feminist art and feminist art history structured around the ethos of process favored by many of the artists featured in the film. In this vein, Hershman Leeson offers multiple platforms for viewers to become participants in a larger conversation. In addition to archival footage and photography, she splices in panels from cartoonist Spain Rodriguez’s accompanying graphic novel adaptation, which is being pitched as part of an ambitious study guide aimed at high school and college students. Stanford University hosts all the footage that could not be included in the final cut in an online archive. And Hershman Leeson encourages viewers to post their own photographs, artworks, and videos on the related community-curated RAW/WAR: Revolution Art Women website and blog.
Spain Rodriguez. Panel from !Women Art Revolution: A Graphic Novel.
Feminist Studio Workshop at Sheila's house, September 1973. Courtesy of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville Archives
This approach is fitting given that !W.A.R. is not a comprehensive survey of feminist art or feminist art history. Rather, it maps the rich terrain of friendships, enmities, generational conflict, and divisive issues that second wave feminism carved within the art world. For example, Marcia Tucker, a former curator at the Whitney Museum of Art, reveals something about the institutional sexism of the day when she recalls how she threatened to go to the New York Times when the Whitney hired her at a lower salary than her male coworkers. Tucker, who was eventually fired, went on to found the New Museum in New York, framing the institution around many of the principles she learned from consciousness-raising groups, community groups, and self-help organizations. There were also internal battles. Franklin Furnace founder Martha Wilson recounts how the sometimes volatile Judy Chicago screamed at her for calling her peers’ work prescriptive, saying, “Don’t you understand what we are trying to do here? We are trying to support these young women!”
!W.A.R. also includes voices that question the long-term effects of this legacy. Artist Alexandra Chowaniec, who is also one of the film’s producers, contends that “there’s a fear within my generation that identifying with feminism is a limitation and not a foundation,” while art historian Amelia Jones states contra to Hershman Leeson: “For complex and perhaps obvious reasons I don’t think feminism managed to substantially change the way art is produced, exhibited, and written about.”
While the direct effect that the !W.A.R. project will have on future generations remains to be seen, it certainly helps to protect the legacy of and enrich the conversation surrounding the artists of the second-wave. Hershman Leeson has offered these radicals the opportunity to speak their own history, and that gesture will change the way feminist art will be produced, seen, and understood.
Take away the more iconic images of Impressionism, whether sylvan glades or water lily umbrellas, and you might find something entirely new under the teeming surfaces of colorful brushstrokes. Organized by inveterate Impressionism scholar Richard Brettell and coordinated here by James Ganz of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Pissarro’s People at the Legion of Honor reconsiders an essential figure of the impressionist movement whose name is not as familiar as Monet’s or Renoir’s. Even the most astute students of art history may be surprised by this exhibition; at last we have an Impressionist’s vision of domestic life, agricultural work, and radical politics joined in a single presentation. Those who think that the best lessons on anarchism can be found at Occupy Wall Street are bound to discover that artists have been there long before.
There are about one hundred works in the show, which is divided between six rooms that are organized thematically and provide a kind of narrative flow. The first room contains intimate portraits of family members; viewers then move on to depictions of interior spaces and figure studies, followed by images of rural life. Paintings are interspersed with drawings and prints throughout, providing a multivalent viewing experience that upends the apparent simplicity of the blockbuster mechanism. This exhibition encourages serious and sustained looking, asking viewers to find visual connections between figures and to attend to a variety of techniques and mediums employed by the artist. There are studies for more complete works, such as the various preparatory sketches shown with The Harvest (1882), but there are also ink drawings, pastels, and prints that are finished works in themselves. Among the paintings, viewers can find oils, tempera, and gouache, demonstrating Pissarro’s experimental approach to technique. Though he rarely strayed far from home, Pissarro evoked his world through diverse methods and consistently pushed himself to rediscover the visions of rural and domestic life around him.
A gallery featuring images of rural markets focuses on some of the most complex multi-figure compositions of Pissarro’s epoch. The artist’s perspective places his viewers right in the thick of things, making it possible for us to view the multitude of characters and activities and to feel the bustle of the crowd. But his subject here is not the streets of Paris, as the Impressionists famously recorded, but the market square of his local village. Though the images were contemporary, one senses the artist’s nostalgia, or at least the valorization of a form of community in which each person has something to
Apple Harvest, 1888; oil on canvas; 24 x 29.13 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Dallas Museum of Art.
The Marketplace, 1882; gouache on paper; 31.75 x 25.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
offer and something else to take home at the end of the day. Trains and tractors—then harbingers of modern life—are notably absent. Yet, what at first appears to be escapism proves to be an indication of the artist’s political sympathies: his deeply held convictions about the interdependency and equality of individuals who can live together and trade with one another without hierarchy or oppression.
In the next room, viewers come face-to-face with a Pissarro never seen in a museum before this exhibition. Displayed under a vitrine, Les Turpitudes Sociales(Social Disgraces) (1889–90) is an album of ink drawings that the artist produced for his nieces’ political education, the last of which he smuggled to England himself to avoid interception by authorities. In this deeply felt work of political illustration are images of social calamities brought on by capitalism, paired with quotes from nineteenth-century anarchists and from the anarchist periodical La Révolte. The album is open to an image in which an archetypal capitalist stands on a pedestal in the middle of a square with a bag of money in his hands, while an impoverished crowd gathers around him seemingly about to expire.1 While Pissarro certainly held the strongest political convictions among the Impressionists, his views were moderate compared with those of French leftists in the 1890s, when the movement was so energized that one of its members assassinated President Sadi Carnot in 1894. Wall texts explain the genesis of French anarchism in the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and earlier utopians, as well as the anarchist mission: a life of dignity for all, devoid of property.
The final room displays an image of the utopia that would follow revolution as Pissarro imagined it. As is visible in the key work Apple Harvest (1888), the artist’s vision of paradise was grounded firmly on rural land, not in the city where he ended his days painting from hotel windows. It would seem that the paterfamilias of Impressionism imagined a life of rural work without the endless hours of labor and grinding poverty associated with it. The golden color on the gallery walls pushes for an upbeat ending. Still, once we acknowledge the very real social crisis of Pissarro’s time (and ours), it is difficult to get back into the phantasmagoria of aesthetic pleasure that museums usually offer. This exhibition reminds us that politics and art are by no means separate. For the imagination to thrive, artists need to think and dream, yes, but also to struggle a little.
Pissarro’s People is on view at the Legion of Honor, in San Francisco, through January 22, 2012.
Richard Serra is a man of action. In the retrospective Richard Serra Drawing currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), his most compelling drawings preserve the energy of the actions that created them in traces left by the movements of the artist’s hand and arm. His famous list of action verbs is posted unobtrusively near the entrance to the show. Don’t miss it. As well as suggesting the motions he has explored in his drawings, it is the key to operations he performed on various materials in his studio that resulted in such iconic sculptures as To Lift (1967), in vulcanized rubber, and Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift (1969/1995), in poured molten lead, both on view in this exhibition. “To draw” also means “to drag,” and in these assembled works, Serra exploits this action fully.
A Drawing in Five Parts (2005) is a recording of a series of arcs that he made by swinging his arm at full length across five sheets of paper. Over and over Serra swings and strokes, leaving thick black tracks of oil stick crayon that begin and end somewhere off the page. In each drawing, multiple black arcs reverberate differently with negative white spaces. In series, the grouped drawings create a rhythmic vortex that activates the entire wall.
In Untitled (14-part roller drawing) (1973), Serra obeyed a set of self-imposed rules, creating the sequence almost mechanically. The artist chose a heavy, inked rubber roller, one commonly used for inking printers’ plates, as his tool. He selected fourteen large sheets of paper and divided each into halves. Beginning with the first sheet, he rolled fourteen layers of thick black ink onto the left side, leaving the right side blank. In subsequent drawings he rolled inked passes onto the right side of the page, increasing the number by one in each, while decreasing the number of passes on the left by one. So, thirteen on the left, one on the right; twelve on the left, two on the right, and so on, until he reached the midpoint with seven roller passes on the left and seven on the right. Then he continued the process until the left side of the page was blank and the right side contained fourteen heavily inked passes. The resulting series is both powerful and surprisingly lyrical—even musical. There is a steady, methodical movement across the whole. Intervals of density and luminosity, moiré patterns, and soft, feathered edges offer subtle variations in the rhythm. The artist’s gesture with the heavy roller is preserved impeccably.
Installation view, Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, 2011. Courtesy of SFMOMA. Photo: Ian Reeves.
Serra often addresses this balance and imbalance between black and white. In his wall-size oil stick drawings, he works on a much larger scale and to different effect. He subtly cuts an edge or tilts a rectangle so that it becomes a trapezoid, a giant illusory mass slightly off-kilter, teetering. The strokes of his tool—a brick of black pigment and wax formed by melting painter’s oil sticks together—are ordered and directional. They fall vertically like heavy black rain, emphasizing gravity, the plane of the wall, and the endless gesture of Serra’s hand and arm, rising and falling, dragging the pigment. The visual weight of the big black drawings echoes the literal weight of his giant steel slab sculptures. And the charged spaces created in the gallery accord with the tactile spaces he creates in his sculptures.
In the site-specific Blank (1978), two 120-by-120-inch black panels, densely encrusted with overlapping strokes of black oil stick, face each other across a small gallery. Dominating their respective walls, the dark panels also butt up against the back white wall, forming corners where black meets stark white. The black panels both frame and crowd the smooth white space that separates them. Far from being simply a drawing on a wall, the piece creates palpable tension in the space.
An assortment of his notebooks assembled for this exhibition reveals sketches and notational drawings Serra has made during his travels. At a recent press preview, the artist spoke about his repeated visits to Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel. He described the volume of the space as an entity in itself, created by the thick walls pierced by light coming through small windows. The notebooks are a rewarding glimpse into his mind’s eye, as he gestures mass against mass, or the angle of a built form against the horizon line. His finished drawings distill and enlarge these concerns with volume, density, light, scale, movement, and labor.
The context of an exhibition can change everything. This past summer, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, I stumbled from the crowded Alexander McQueen show into the quiet, adjacent spaces where this same exhibition of Serra’s drawings was installed. Compared with McQueen’s exotic visions, Serra’s giant black walls seemed emotionally cold and cerebral. On view now at the SFMOMA, the same work (with a few additions) seems warm and sensuous—the product of sustained effort and passionate restraint.
Departing from the Walter and McBean Galleries’ usual focus on identity and politics, Think Art-Act Science considers the relationship between art and science in the work of eight artists who recently participated in residencies at various European research laboratories through the ZhdK Zurich University of the Arts. Although the pieces and the creative way in which they’re installed succeed to varying degrees, Think Art-Act Science nonetheless raises many relevant issues regarding curatorial practice, art production, and the intersection of art and science.
Curated by Iréne Hediger, Hou Hanru, and Mary Ellyn Johnson, Think Art-Act Science is emblematic of trends in contemporary curation, displaying a dizzying amount of information while overstating the exhibit’s thematic cohesiveness, often to the detriment of the work itself. Dark gray walls with yellow accents visually unify the show and give it an installation-like aesthetic. Each artist’s name is stenciled on the wall near their piece, which are further set apart within the space by hexagonally shaped outlines on the floor made from yellow duct tape. In addition, some of the works are set off by sculptural dividers made of corrugated cardboard and steel that also serve as slick backdrops to other pieces in the show. When viewed alongside many of the pieces’ flashing lights, projections, and intermittent aural components, these additional design elements leave few places to rest the eye. Additionally, each installation is accompanied by a small monitor with headphones that features footage of the artists and scientists talking about their projects. While this process of collaboration is central to the exhibition, I wish that the artists had found a purposeful way of integrating it into their work. Moreover, while many of the installations are based upon abstract or obscure scientific information and concepts, the overly explanatory nature of some of the accompanying videos not only presents an interpretive dead end to the work, but is simply distracting.
Alexandre Joly’s Fish Skin (2010) is an elegant, if rather perplexing, installation of Piezo speakers, magnets, and piano wire, suggestive of a diagram representing any number of man-made, natural, or conceptual systems. The piece, which also abstractly resembles an electric harp, softly relays amphibian vocal calls that Joly recorded during his residency. The ambient sound of the other works in the gallery and the piece’s low volume require that the viewer lean in close to it. I wish Joly had further developed this intimate dynamic between object, sound, and viewer. Unfortunately, the amphibian calls are so abstract and unfamiliar that they really could be anything. Knowing their origin left me indifferent to the aural experience they produced.
With its cluster of flickering neon lights and complicated wiring, Christian Gozenbach’s QUARC (Quantum Art Crystal) (2010) is the most visually demanding piece in the exhibition. While cleverly fabricated, QUARC’s purpose gets lost in its intricate machinery. Gozenbach has created an elaborate system of magnetic wheels that complete electrical circuits to individually trigger neon lights. Except for a motorized central wheel, all of the piece’s other wheels turn according to the magnetic pull and resistance of the wheels that surround them. This cascading system of cause-and-effect relationships
Alexandre Joly. Fish Skin, 2010; nails, magnets, piezo speakers, copper wire, mp3 player, and piano strings. Courtesy of the Artist.
Nicole Ottiger. Third Person, No. 1, 2010; pencil on paper; 1.12 x 1.5 m. Courtesy of the Artist.
makes it improbable that the magnets will properly align to simultaneously illuminate the neon tubes. While I appreciate Gozenbach’s exploration of randomness and probability, the piece itself is too self-explanatory; it is a demonstrative model of a closed system, rather than a more expansive one that invites questions about the relationships it demonstrates.
Nicole Ottiger takes a different approach in Third Person, No. 1, 2, 3, and 7 (2010) using Virtual Reality (VR) to probe the conceptual and poetic implications of technology in regards to representation, place, time, and self. With the simplest presentation in the exhibition—a series of crude graphite and marker self-portraits—Ottiger provides just enough information to clearly convey the conceptual ramifications of her project. The accompanying video nicely explains that in order to draw a self-portrait, one must have a third-person perspective. Rather than using the standard mirror or photograph, Ottiger based her drawings on the feed from a video camera positioned two meters behind her. This footage was then fed to her via a VR visor. Ottiger and the scientists programmed a delay into the feed so that she saw her movements moments after they had occurred, requiring her to constantly coordinate her physical location with the visual information she received as she attempted to draw herself. Most interestingly, when the researchers tapped her with a wooden rod, her physical and visual sense of time and place synchronized and her drawings became more accurate. Ottiger’s resulting project attempts to parse out her various sensory perceptions (e.g., movement, vision, and touch) to explore how we understand and document the presentness of our lived bodies and experiences.
With the exception of Ottiger’s, many pieces are encumbered by complicated processes, intricate machinery, or arcane references, which wind up obscuring rather than enriching the artists’ original intent. Rather than attempting to create artworks out of science, it might have been more fruitful for the artists to use science to probe artistic and poetic questions. Working alongside scientists in laboratories may have provided the artists with access to many new materials, technologies, and methodologies, but I am uncertain if the participants chose the most effective ways to convey their ideas. The exhibit's ambiance, however aesthetically unifying, also had the negative effect of overwhelming some of the individual works. Many of the videos in Think Art-Act Science repeatedly discuss whether a given project qualifies as art or science. Some viewers might need to be persuaded that what they're seeing are “proper” artworks; for others familiar with the work of Mark Dion, Eduardo Kac, and Carsten Höller this intersection of art and science is just another example of contemporary art's interdisciplinarity. The more pressing question that Think Art-Act Science leaves largely unaddressed is also the rather basic one of how to merge content and form.
Think Art-Act Science is on view at the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries through November 12, 2011.
The work in Cheap Trick Part 2 appears to primarily address itself to the by-now-canonical postmodern questions regarding authenticity in a mediated world saturated by spectacular imagery. Whether as a representation of the formulaic relation of the human being to commodified objects, or as interventions against the body’s conditioned behaviors as it shares the sensible world with other commodified bodies, both Jonah Susskind and Zefrey Throwell’s works dramatize the somatic encounter with the simulacral.
Susskind’s pieces worry familiar thresholds: the real and the mimetic, the form of painting and the form of sculpture, use and excess. Through strategies of masquerade, gimmick, and scale, his self-described “still lifes” question the economic fact of the object as such. In Ply (2011) and 2 x 6 (2011), for instance, Susskind has painted stretches of canvas to look like ordinary pieces of functional wood. From afar, the virtuosic replications of machine-made cuts of wood suggest the codes of minimalist sculpture. But approaching the objects effects a gradual denudation of the illusion, drawing the viewer into an aporetic theater of cognition and recognition—is it wood or is it a painting? Other pieces foreground the mechanics behind such illusion. In Rug (2011), an unremarkable white mat lies on the gallery’s floor, while a burgundy pattern is projected onto it from above. Rug enacts the drama of fetishized value—the transitory nature of decoration as it meets the blank slate of total function. The invitation into this temporal and spatial play was welcomed by the attendees at the opening as people and even dogs freely walked across the mat, dancing, stepping, kicking up dust, spinning on their heads.
Where Susskind’s still lifes engage the gallery audience in a drama of recognition and illumination, Throwell’s videos document interventions into the normative mobilities of everyday life. Some of these interventions take place in the urban strongholds of contemporary finance. In the extremely timely showing of Ocularpation: One San Francisco (2008), Throwell emerges from the Montgomery Street BART/MUNI station in a suit, only to carefully strip nude and sit at a desk with a cup of coffee, talking on his cell phone and miming the ergonomics of functional semiocapitalist practice. In another of Throwell’s videos, New York City Paints Better Than Me (2010),the artist crawls through Greeley Square in a bright white jumpsuit. A crowd of mostly daytime workers watches his ordeal, concerned, confused, curious. The end of the crawl
Jonah Susskind. Ply, 2010; oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist and Queen's Nails Projects, San Francisco.
Zefrey Throwell. Ocularpation: One San Francisco, 2008; video; TRT: 7:29 min. Courtesy of the Artist.
feels climactic; the still of the besmirched suit ends the piece as a kind of credit roll. Indeed, Throwell’s videos consistently use a cinematic lexicon to manipulate the affective tempo, resulting in a suspense that can be manipulated toward comic ends. In Vamping: Part One, Tits and Pickle (2010), the very duration of the “sex” scene between cucumber and tits enchants the viewer to stay tuned until the excessive and hilarious fruit salad money shot.
Many of the pieces in Cheap Trick abut the puzzling borders between genuineness and irony, autonomy and interpellation, legibility and obscurity. And yet they seem to me to mark a real difference from the admittedly rehearsed orthodox postmodern “interrogation” of such overdetermined zones. Which is to say, simply, that having taken certain of those questions about the real and the representative as givens, both Susskind and Throwell initiate new kinds of play from that givenness. This play is formalized via careful, strategic manipulations of affect varying in their political intensity.
Tongue Slap (2011), for instance, a video document that shows Throwell and a collaborator disrobe in a gallery, don suits bedecked with lollipops, and engage in some kind of erotic wrestling/sugar-suck, doesn’t foreground social ambitions as many historical engagements of its kind do. But Throwell’s many references to canonical performance and body art are not merelyironic retellings or translations evacuated of any strong politics. The sight of a seemingly privileged, young white man dragging himself on his stomach through downtown Manhattan in New York City Paints Better Than Meis still able to produce a kind of perturbing identity trouble. Throwell candidly delights in the response of his viewers; the confused pleasure his performances cause is tactfully emphasized in the editing.
Susskind’s objects also suggest nuanced political meaning, although they uniformly insist on forms of humor. But in a deadly serious move, his work ultimately resuscitates the human body as a privileged manufacturer of precious materials. What appear to be mass-produced objects (plywood, sandpaper, marijuana), which we all know are typically made by machines or slaves, become highly unique, virtuosic works in Cheap Trick. Far from acting as the emblem of the “free market,” the bizarre products of Susskind’s workshop defy business logic. The brutal economic facts that pertain to the structure of mass production are not solved by this alternative, but they are at stake precisely for the careful viewer of his works. The social surprise Throwell evokes resembles the uncanny recognition viewers experience when apprehending Susskind’s objects.
These experimental economies are mirrored by the installation of the show at Queen’s Nails Projects itself—nothing appears to be for sale, for instance—so even if these objects do finally participate in the economics of the bourgeois art market, their “value” remains an object of mystery. Like the “truth” of one of Susskind’s still lifes or the anticipated climax of one of Throwell’s actions, the determination of value is suspended and deferred. And given the actually catastrophic world conditions that they (mis)represent or into which they intervene, these works in this context are always fun. That is, the deranged objects that they take up are absorbed into a theatrical critique that tends to present the grotesque as the comic uncanny. They’re fun…or at least funnish. Funny…but not funny ha-ha. I laughed. I cried. I laughed until I cried.
Cheap Trick Part 2 is on view at Queen’s Nails Projects, in San Francisco, through November 5, 2011.
As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is republishing Maggie Haas's article "The Take-Away: Run Off at MacArthur B Arthur," on the group exhibition at MacArthur B Arthur, which you can also read here at Daily Serving.
________
Anyone who’s ever temped in an office or published a zine knows the marvelous idiosyncrasies of the Xerox machine: the sliding, illuminated beam that scans the images; the warm stacks of copies identical enough to be called “exact” yet often full of bleeding letters; shiny black-hole shadows and flecks of who-knows-what from the machine itself. In Run Off, now on view at MacArthur B Arthur in Oakland, curators Aaron Harbour, Jackie Im, and Brandon Drew Holmes set out to investigate the nature of the “take away” art object, selecting artists to work with multiples and produce pieces for viewers to handle and take home. These artists get us to step back from the ever-present glow of intangible images on our phone and computer screens and into something slower and stranger: the scanning light of the photocopier.
Jon Kuzmich’s work Ethos, 2011, exploits the individual fingerprint of one copy machine, re-Xeroxing a page of text until the successive generations of copies warp and twist into a black Milky Way. Kuzmich displays not only the reams of paper he went through, but an animation of each copy scanned. The image melts frame by frame, from one sheet to the next, invoking the photocopier as a source of light and heat, or a tactile, irregular experience.
Cybele Lyle’s Untitled (De/Construction), 2011, presents a series of small, photographed architectural quotes tenuously assembled as a chaotic card house. Lyle lights the structure with a projected view of a white room. Visitors can take away
David Kasprzak. 10-22-38 Astoria, 2011; mixed media. Courtesy of the Artist and MacArthur B Arthur, Oakland.
Hunter Longe. Reproduction Destruction Connection, 2011; mixed media. Courtesy of the Artist and MacArthur B Arthur, Oakland.
panels, altering the sculpture and the play of light. At the opening exhibition, viewers took panels and also protectively reconstructed the teetering structure. Hunter Longe, working with large-scale photocopies in Reproduction Destruction Connection, 2011, offers viewers two poster-sized copies of a fuzzy, bar-shaped shadow. In the piece on view, two sheets are layered together, the top sheet rubbed translucent with olive oil to produce a ghostly, X-shape. Clean and minimalistic, Longe’s piece speaks quietly to the power of customizing and altering mass-produced items.
What might be the strongest work in the show is perversely missing: David Kasprzak’s 10-22-38 Astoria, 2011, a copy of the first photocopy, was produced for the show in an edition of one. Snagged by a lucky visitor before most of the opening crowd arrived, its absence is a convincing argument for the power of the singular object, if not in the world, at least in our minds.
Also on view are works by Marcella Faustini and Reuben Lorch-Miller.
Run Off is on view at MacArthur B. Arthur, in Oakland, through October 30, 2011.
Unlike the fate for most of us, David Ireland has a community still cogitating about him and his work thirty months after his death. Not known particularly as a teacher—too independent, too ornery—apparently he taught enough to have an outsized influence on quite a few artists, at least as evidenced by this exhibition. Ten artists contribute pieces to the show; these include new works made for the exhibition as well as works made in the past that reflect Ireland’s influence. In their often-moving narratives, included as wall text, most attribute taking a workshop or seminar with Ireland as a career-changing if not life-changing experience. The title of the show, You Can’t Make Art by Making Art, is, in fact, the title of a 1980 Ireland exhibition that has proven to be a long-recalled pedagogical aphorism.
Ireland amalgamated several artistic approaches popular during his career. He had the pencil-behind-the ear, artist-as-builder approach I associate with other Bay Area artists of the ’70s and ’80s, such as Jim Pomeroy and Jock Reynolds. He had the Fluxus ethos of utilizing the most modest materials available in a deadpan way. He had the Davis Funk (William Wiley and Robert Arneson) hostility to pretension and art with a capital A, and a love of puns and humor. He embraced the conceptual underpinning in emphasizing process and the self-assignment of tasks as art.
In tribute albums, musicians either faithfully reproduce the sound of the honored artist or renounce any such ambition and instead try to make the original song their own, which makes for a subtler kind of memorial. Most of the artists in this show make sincere imitation Irelands as memorials, while a few embody his spirit in their own work as monuments. Sheila Ghidini executes a terrific example of the former strategy with Chair of Heightened Perception (2011), a simple piece, in which she cuts the legs off a green chair and mounts the upper half with the seat and back at eye height, while leaving the feet on the floor. It is a simple and apt memorial to Ireland’s love of chairs and found furniture, as well as the making of small changes to create articulate elisions, as the space between the two severed parts becomes cluttered with invisible suggestion. Randy Colosky pays homage with
Randy Colosky. Cinderblock with Great Stuff Expansion Foam, 2010; bronze. Courtesy of the Artist and Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Oakland. Photo: Dasha Matsuura.
________ CORRECTION:
Please note: Randy Colosky's sculpture is made entirely of bronze, with aspects painted to resemble foam. Mie Preckler wove the tweed for the caps and made the prototype; a hat maker in Ireland produced the five hundred caps.
Mie Preckler. 500 Cap'sTreat, 1983-5; chair and Irish-tweed caps. Courtesy of the Artist and Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Oakland. Photo: Dasha Matsuura.
Cinderblock with Great Stuff Expansion Foam (2010), a bronze cinderblock stuffed éclair-like with yellow plastic foam in Ireland’s signature altered construction material, dumb object style. “Dumb” was a key word for Ireland: it connotes modest silence, as in “shut up about the explanations”; it confesses to intentional meaninglessness; and it revels in pure visual pleasure.
Mie Preckler shows a charming work titled 500 Cap'sTreat (1983-5), which puns on Ireland’s masterpiece, his home at 500 Capp Street in San Francisco, and consists of caps made from Irish tweed that was purchased in western Ireland. Six are on view on the wall above another simple green wooden chair on the floor. Mari Andrews neatly ensconces steel wool into two wooden containers—the essential surreal object—flanking a ball of steel wool on a shelf, the essential Ireland object. Sabine Reckewell presents a small cardboard box that contains string and nails that in a past life were the elements of a room-size installation à la Patrick Ireland, ironically. Jordan Biren offers a boxed photo collection of prints of everyday objects that evoke Ireland’s touch without ever directly quoting him.
The consummate usurpation of the Ireland style is a clever Ray Beldner project. The gallery is on a side street that is the center of Oakland’s lively first Friday celebration, Art Murmur, where hundreds of young people gather monthly in the name of art. Beldner replaced a square of concrete sidewalk in front of the gallery with his own concrete section with Ireland’s name and years impressed in it. This is an oddly moving semi-permanent monument to Ireland: half a perfect Ireland knock-off, half a brass star in a grimy Oakland equivalent of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
You Can’t Make Art by Making Art: Artists Reflect on the Legacy of David Ireland will be on view at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, in Oakland, through November 19, 2011.
Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980,the Hammer Museum’s contribution to the J. Paul Getty Trust's Pacific Standard Time initiative, aims to be the most comprehensive survey of black artists’ contributions to the birth of Los Angeles’ cultural landscape. Curated by Kellie Jones, the exhibition focuses on the mid to late twentieth century, a tumultuous period for the United States and a sensational one for black Americans, from the civil rights movement and the birth of Black Power up to the very beginnings of the culture wars. Across the museum’s second-floor galleries, the show unpacks how black artists mobilized amidst this sociopolitical turmoil and creatively negotiated the very terms “black” and “artist” (and in many cases “female,” as well).
A commissioned mixed-media sculpture by Maren Hassinger and an electric sign by Sam Durant flank the exhibit’s entrance. Made of nautical rope and chain, Hassinger’s River (2011) sprawls across the floor in a snakelike S pattern directly in front of the museum gift shop. The references to the treacherous Middle Passage are as unavoidable as the piece itself. Durant’s sign, End White Supremacy (2008), demands an end to one of the reasons why these types of exhibitions are developed. Though both works evoke the past, they firmly anchor Now Dig This! in the present by posing the question of why, in 2011, must curators continue to mount these types of surveys? It is a question that Now Dig This! keeps in play, even as the thematic sections of each of the five galleries continually provide potential answers.
Jones begins the show with a group of artists she calls “Frontrunners,” and her selections are surprising and revelatory, even for viewers well versed in the history of black artists. On one wall hang sculptor Melvin Edwards’ small, welded metal reliefs from his Lynch Fragment series begun in 1963. Made over a thirty-year span, these works had all but been forgotten by history until art historian Elvan Zabunyan wrote extensively about them in Black Is a Color (Dis Voir, 2006). Edwards’ nearly indiscernible masses of welded metal objects elegantly and disarmingly connect industrial capitalism to the systems of bondage upon which it was built. On the other walls are several large-scale drawings by Charles White, an artist previously unknown to me. A few of his drawings feature cloaked black figures. In one titled Harriet (1972), likely in reference to Harriet Tubman, a crimson splatter above a figure’s head evokes the North Star, which Tubman and other slaves used to guide themselves to freedom.
Moving through the exhibition, it becomes clear why Jones chose to begin with and routinely returns to White. One of thousands of blacks who moved west from northern and eastern cities in the 1950s, White taught and mentored most of the artists in the show. The works on view reflect his lessons about the sociopolitical import of art and the power of artists to engage communities in effecting positive change. Betye Saar’s assemblage Black Girl’s Window (1969) and David Hammons’s body print America the Beautiful (1968)
Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980. Installation view, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 2, 2011-January 8, 2012. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.
________ CORRECTION:
Please note: Sam Durant’s work End White Supremacy (2008) is part of the Hammer Contemporary Collection and not part of the exhibition Now Dig This! on view through January 8, 2012.
Charles White, Love Letter #1, 1971; lithograph with documents; 22 3/16 x 30 in. (56.4 x 76.2 cm). Private Collection. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum.
also demonstrate White’s influence in cultivating an aesthetic that is the deepest, most provocative visual expression of the black American experience.
Part of the exhibition is dedicated to the ethnically diverse support network of White and company, but with its motley assortment of prints and wall sculptures, the room lacks any unifying cohesion beyond the relationship between each piece’s creators and the other artists in the show. One item that gives pause is a suitcase that White left in the archive of New York City’s Just Above Midtown Gallery, where it sat unopened for thirty years. The suitcase contained many items, including an issue of LIFE magazine with Picasso on the cover. Unfortunately, only a few of these items are displayed. Given the suitcase’s high historic value, it was disappointing to see Jones treat it as a ready-made, signed by White’s student Dan Concholar no less. Yet Jones also achieves something extraordinary by emphasizing Concholar’s signature and the LIFE cover over the suitcase’s other contents. Her display strategy coyly calls into question historically held assumptions that black artists were working separately from “the rest” of the art world and were intellectually impoverished. Presenting the suitcase as a ready-made places Concholar and White in conversation with Duchamp and the Dadaists. Similarly, the choice of magazine issue winks at White’s experiments with modified Cubism, such as Black Pope (Sandwichboard Man) (1973) and Love Letter #1 (1971), which are also on view. Thus, one can’t talk about these paintings without also talking about Picasso, whose own appropriation of traditional African art has been problematically canonized.
Now Dig This! is perhaps too heavy on painting and sculpture, with less attention given to new media practices. The early videos of Ulysses Jenkins, a former member of avant-garde media art collective Electronic Café International, offer a small corrective toward the end of the exhibition. Shown on three plasma screens, each with a pair of headphones, the viewing experience is less than ideal. However, Remnants of the Watts Festival (1972–73), In the Spirit of Charles White (1970), and King David (1978) are three important historical documents of the kinds of cultural production happening among many of the exhibit’s artists in the wake of the Watts Rebellion. Remnants is Jenkins’ attempt to offer a sympathetic video image of blacks as a counterpoint to the media coverage of the Watts Rebellion. In the Spirit and King David capture critical moments in the artistic careers of beloved teacher White and his student David Hammons. These three works, much like Now Dig This! itself, are videotaped contestations-cum-testimonies to an under-recognized and misrepresented legacy.
Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 is on view at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, through January 8, 2012.
Now in its third year, the Creative Time Summit is the New York City–based nonprofit's annual daylong conference that explores socially engaged art in the public sphere. This year's summit was held in conjunction with Living as Form, Creative Time's coinciding survey exhibition, which documented more than twenty years of socially engaged projects.1 In addition to twenty-nine speakers, there were remarks from Creative Time’s President and Artistic Director Anne Pasternak and Chief Curator Nato Thompson, a participatory performance by My Barbarian, a keynote address by GRITtv broadcaster Laura Flanders, and the presentation of the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change awarded to Jeanne van Heeswijk, with a video address by Laurie Anderson.
Speakers included journalists, historians, educators, academics, artists, and curators. An odd sound effect would chime as speakers approached the eight-minute time limit; if they went over, their voices were drowned out by live music. When Mierle Laderman Ukeles concluded in the nick of time and raised her arms triumphantly as the music started, the audience applauded. When several others, such as Hou Hanru, went long and were cut off, the audience booed, but the music played on. Remote audience members listening to a live stream of the proceedings were encouraged to participate via Twitter.
The notion raised by Thompson that all dissent is, on some level, creative dissent was reflected in both the wider range of projects presented at the summit and those documented in Living as Form. Regardless of critical reception, socially engaged art projects are proliferating around the world. Whether or not they are considered art in the formal sense is another matter—one that might ultimately have very little impact on those engaged by the actual work, but a matter that is nonetheless often rigorously contested in the critical discourse surrounding contemporary art. Art historian and curator Claire Bishop, for example, had a field day skewering the first summit in a review for Artforum.2 The heated responses that ensued online offer a portrait of the debate that still swirls around the status of socially engaged practices within contemporary art.
The inclusion this year of more regional, member-driven community arts organizations intermixed with projects more easily identifiable as “contemporary art” further blurred categorical distinctions. Thompson freely admitted to an absence of concern around such distinctions, instead favoring a broad perspective of socially engaged cultural production galvanized by a desire to change the circumstances of the disenfranchised. Those who preferred a narrower, more canonical definition of contemporary art could tune in or tune out at their discretion; after all, one only had to wait eight minutes for the next presentation.
Many of the speakers at this year’s summit knowingly played off the perceived ambiguity of their work as art in the formal sense. Representatives from Austrian artist collective WochenKlauser, whose projects include a mobile medical
Carlton Turner of Alternate ROOTS on community initiatives in Baltimore. Creative Time Summit 3, September 23, 2011. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Sam Horine.
Darren OʼDonnell of Mammalian Diving Reflex, Creative Time Summit 3, September 23, 2011. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Sam Horine.
clinic that treats six hundred homeless patients a month, put it plainly: “We are artists and we are allowed to call anything we do art. It’s just that simple.” Given that the prevailing critical discourse has spent nearly a century validating a ready-made urinal, I am inclined to agree. Points of critical consideration in social practice are, in many ways, diametrically opposed to contemporary art as it relates to the art world-cum-market. Whereas community impact is alien to discussions of criticality in contemporary art, it is a stalwart measure in activism. If the work succeeds formally without meeting activist measures of success—Does it engage community and site? Is long-term impact sustainable?—it still fails. If it succeeds on both counts, the art-invested community sometimes still remains skeptical. Consider Alastair Smart’s ruthless assessment of Ai Weiwei’s oeuvre in the London Telegraph earlier this year.3 At the same moment that the artist’s life was at risk during unlawful detention by Chinese authorities and people all over the world rallied for his release, critics like Smart chose to offer formal critique.
This tension was apparent during the summit when a remote audience member challenged via Twitter that the work of Mammalian Diving Reflex, who presented the amusing project Haircuts by Children (date unavailable), might have been initiated to capitalize on funding for youth-based projects. The implication was representative of the general skepticism with which the art world often views social practice. Unfortunately, the format didn’t allow for the artist’s response, which made the comment seem merely snarky rather than a useful opening for discussion around the pitfalls of socially engaged art.
But what of this difference between contemporary art in the larger sense and socially engaged practices? Alternate ROOTS Executive Director Carlton Turner noted how his regional arts organization developed as an outgrowth of the legendary Highlander Research and Education Center—where Rosa Parks took a ten-day training session the summer before initiating the Montgomery bus boycott—specifically to meet the needs of the growing population of artists who work for social justice. The significance of this legacy offers a critical insight into the broader goals of artists who work within their communities to effect change.
The strength of socially engaged work lies in embracing the risk of failure. Though often held to the impossible standard that it must be positively received by vast numbers of people—i.e., everyone—to be considered a critical success, the only guarantee is that reception will be mixed, as it would be with any other artwork. Some success is to be found when new practitioners and audiences emerge from the process—true success is found when this is met with actual social change. Each year the Creative Time Summit presents artists who are genuinely trying to effect change in the world beyond the art world with varying degrees of success. For Creative Time and all of the presenters at the summit, most of the critique leveraged at socially engaged art is merely a distraction, unless put to constructive use. (To both their credit, Creative Time engaged Bishop to pen an essay for the forthcoming Living as Form catalogue, to be published by MIT in 2012.) Although socially engaged practice may often struggle to find currency in the larger art discourse, the real life issues at stake in the work promise greater impact than any review, favorable or otherwise.
The Creative Time Summit: Living as Form was presented by Creative Time at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on September 23, 2011.
________ NOTES:
1. Following the conclusion of the Creature Time Summit, attendees were treated to a preview for Living as Form, which featured documentation from more than one hundred projects and included off-site projects and lectures. The Living as Form archive is forthcoming online and promises an array of more than 350 projects.
In his new exhibition of ink drawings at Ever Gold Gallery, We Bought The Seagram Building, Canadian artist Lucas Soi explores the role of commerce in art. As the title of the exhibit suggests, Soi begins with the fictional premise that he was able to purchase the Seagram Building, an icon of corporate modernist architecture, in 2009, at the nadir of the current economic downturn. With the body of stark, black-and-white works related to this acquisition, Soi focuses attention on the network of money and patronage that is intertwined with the worlds of art and architecture.
In his dispassionately executed and precise drawings, Soi depicts the elevation and floor plan of the Seagram Building, alongside a rendering of the supposed bank draft and the presumably fictional, ultra-exclusive American Express Black Centurion card that he used to purchase it. The drawings all share the same size and rectangular format, emphasizing a correspondence between the financial and artistic; he gives architectural monument and transactional receipt equal weight.
Completed in 1958, the Seagram Building was commissioned by the Canadian beverage company to be its New York headquarters. Seagram chose Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as the architect who, with Philip Johnson, designed a bronze and glass box. It immediately became a quintessential example of the International Style, which eschewed superfluous decoration in favor of a sleek and minimal expression of a building’s structure. The Seagram Building now exemplifies everything we have come to think of as modern—a cool, global style that signaled a break from the outdated ornamentality of previous eras.
Yet, as much as the Seagram Building expressed the ideals of mid-century progress, it also represents the authoritarianism of the moneyed elites for whom it was built. Mies’ “imagery conjured up efficiency, cleanliness, organization and standardization, and so fitted the bill for big-business America.”1 It is no coincidence, then, that it was the world’s most expensive skyscraper at the time of its completion.2 Purchased by a French conglomerate in 2000, Soi now inserts himself into this narrative, “purchasing” it in 2009 for a mere million and a quarter euros and thereby cheekily repatriating it back to Canadian hands. By attaching a value amount to this supposedly priceless icon, Soi reflects his disillusionment with the dreams of modernism and globalization, making transparent the often-hidden history of finance underlying culture.
In exposing these unseen financial machinations, Soi’s work recalls earlier examples of conceptual institutional critique, such as those by Hans Haacke and Gordon Matta-Clark. In his landmark work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), Haacke chronicles through photographs and documentation the real estate holdings of one of New York’s biggest slum lords. The Guggenheim canceled an exhibition that was to feature this work and fired the curator,
Black Card, 2011 (detail); ink on paper; 30 x 44 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Ever Gold Gallery, San Francisco.
Untitled (Seagram Building, after Mies van der Rohe),2011; ink on paper; 30 x 44 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Ever Gold Gallery, San Francisco.
apparently not wanting to sully their cultural institution with issues of commerce. For his Reality Properties: Fake Estates project of the early 1970s, Matta-Clark purchased ridiculously small parcels of land in Queens—spaces between buildings or curbs—and documented them, drawing attention to issues of land use and property ownership that are literally right in front of us.
And indeed, the tightest works in Soi’s exhibition are those that directly address the visual and conceptual links between architecture, art, and money. The least successful, however, albeit the one with the most interesting backstory, references the murals that were commissioned to grace the Four Seasons restaurant in the lobby of the Seagram Building. Mark Rothko was originally chosen for the job. When he realized that his paintings, which embodied the search for the sublime, would be nothing more than decoration for a room full of "the richest bastards in New York," his contempt was clear; stating that his goal was "to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room," he promptly returned his payment and put the paintings in storage.3 Soi’s drawing, a rectangular grid of circles recalling Ben-Day dots, depicts what the mural would have looked like had it been painted by Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein instead. Pop Art, with its emphasis on surface and unapologetic commercialism, would appear to have been a better ideological fit for the luxury restaurant. However, Soi’s drawing does not tell us this story and it loses its power without this context. The more successful works in the exhibition clearly present art as commodity, like Soi’s Am Ex card, which echoes Warhol’s silkscreens of dollar bills.
Ever Gold Gallery has created a spare, yet engaging installation by hanging Soi’s drawings below bright white neon lights, thereby unifying the space. With the floor painted white, entering the gallery is like stepping into a light box. Soi’s obsessive stippling technique builds up the drawings from thousands of black dots, similar to the illustrations in the Wall Street Journal. They are beautiful, delicate, ghostlike ciphers that dematerialize under the bright lights. The minute marks from which each drawing is composed compel viewers to repeatedly move in close and step back to ascertain the macro with the micro. His impressive technique is what transforms these works from simply pieces of documentation to seductive images that encourage extended gazing. But Soi’s work also combines Pop Art’s superficial aesthetic with Conceptual Art’s institutional critique to question the legacy of Modernism. The way each image is rendered with the same deadpan technique, with the same shape and size, makes all the more apparent this correlation between finance, architecture, and art. Considering recent events on Wall Street, the title of the exhibition has special relevance, as it suggests an upending of the economic status quo—that "We" may finally be able to share in something that previously had been available to only the richest 1 percent.
We Bought The Seagram Building is on view at Ever Gold Gallery, in San Francisco, through October 27, 2011.
________ NOTES:
1. William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 3rd edition (New York, Phaidon, 1996), 409.
3. John Fischer, “Mark Rothko: Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Man,” Harper's Magazine, 241 (July 1970): 16-23, as quoted by Jonathan Jones in “Feeding Frenzy,” The Guardian, December 6, 2002, Weekend Section, 36, http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2002/dec/07/artsfeatures
A fisherman follows the course of a stream one day and discovers a blooming peach tree grove that leads to a secret path and a magical land. A sanctuary for those who had fled the tyranny of the Qin emperor, the land is full of cheerful and contented people. This is the story of The Peach Colony, Tao Yuanming's famous Song dynasty poem and the inspiration for Yang Yongliang’s exhibition of the same name, currently on view at Galerie Paris-Beijing.
Yongliang’s intricately detailed black-and-white images, assembled from lots of smaller photo clips, at first appear to be taking this subject quite literally. Men in long white robes wander and meditate among trees and streams or in valleys surrounded by craggy mountains. Yongliang’s idealized photographic landscapes recall those of traditional Chinese paintings. Viewers may be seduced, but closer inspection reveals mountains populated by masses of tiny digitally manipulated skyscrapers—piles and piles of them, like skyscraper-favelas reaching into the sky. The valleys are, in fact, industrial wastelands, scattered with disused machinery parts and glutted with swamps. The vivid environments conjured by the artist are entirely artificial. They are masterpieces of Photoshop wizardry, carefully crafted together from small cutouts of digital photographs to create large, sometimes vast, prints with Hieronymous Bosch-scale detail.
But Yongliang’s images are more dystopian than hellish. With the exhibition’s references to Tao’s poem and traditional Chinese art, the artist seems to warn of the destruction not only of the environment, but also of the past; Tao’s magical sanctuary has been corrupted. In the light of China’s exponential growth and increasing urbanization, Yongliang’s work seems to register anxiety about what is being lost. During a short trip to Beijing, I saw evidence everywhere of the rate at which the old Chinese hutongs are being demolished, and modern apartment complexes erected. Yongliang takes this notion to the extreme in Infinite Landscape(2011), in which there is no area of land that is left undeveloped. Projected in its own gallery room, this stop-motion animation depicts an industrial city situated around a few mountains. Cars move continuously along snaking freeways, a zeppelin flies overhead, and the occasional explosion is a reminder of the unending destruction necessary to keep this city’s machinery fuelled.
Perhaps the bleakest of the images on display is The Lonely Angler (2011), in which a fisherman sits alone in his boat and hangs his line into a still black lake—apparently lifeless and peppered with ominous-looking, spiked buoys. True to its title, the image evokes feelings of loneliness and hopelessness; the buoys are like red flags, warning of the lake’s inhospitable environment. It seems unlikely that anything lives here, let alone enough to provide a catch for the fisherman. People scarcely figure in Yongliang’s landscapes, but their presences are felt all the more for his austere backdrops. In Ode to the Goddess of Luo River (2011), a man and a woman stand across from each other on either side of a river running through a rocky wasteland with skyscrapers and ruins silhouetted against a gray sky. Rather than detracting from the romantic tension between these two figures, the inert landscape appears to heighten it, setting them into relief against a lonely world.
Yongliang’s approach to his subject is hardly subtle—turning a once-wild landscape into an urban wasteland seems an obvious tactic. But the artist’s execution and meticulous construction imbue the images with sensitivity. The place of the individual within these apocalyptic visions, and the strange aesthetic they possess, makes them compelling. Even in Heavenly City(2008), in which factory fumes resembling an atomic mushroom cloud spew out cranes, bridges, roads, and other industrial apparatuses, the proportions and composition of the image are so balanced, and the tones so rich in texture, that they produce a paradoxically beautiful image. Yongliang's vivid and surreal collages first lure in viewers, then confront them with their true, shocking content. And yet, a sense of feng shui in these landscapes somehow remains intact.
In many ways, Yongliang’s subject may be a cliché to the Western eye—contemporary art is awash with ruin-porn, and readymades constructed from recycled objects have been on the art market for decades. However, on the basis of a three-day exploration of Beijing’s arts districts, I would argue that environmental concerns are increasingly present in contemporary Chinese art and aligned with a burgeoning ecological consciousness. But is there something beyond cliché that Western viewers can take away from these images? The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, for example, believing that our alienation from waste is part of the environmentalist’s problem, urges consumers to find some aesthetic value, even poetry and spirituality, in detritus. Perhaps Yongliang’s works propose a similar such reconfiguration of beauty through waste.
The Peach Colony is on view at Galerie Paris-Beijing, in Beijing, through November 10, 2011.
Assembled under a programmatic directive, select works in Residency Projects II resonate surprisingly well with one another, suggesting sly curatorial vision or a fluke of consistency and coincidence. The show is the second of two exhibitions featuring projects by Kala’s 2010–2011 Fellowship artists, who were awarded access to Kala’s traditional and digital printmaking equipment. One of the appeals of Residency Projects II is the artists’ diverse usage of this equipment to make sculpture, animation, and photography, as well as traditional prints. The show’s cohesion might be due to the fact that the exhibiting artists are San Francisco locals and alumni of California College of the Arts (CCA). (Residency Projects I included local and international artists of various alma maters.) It is worth noting that the Kala directors selected the Fellows in conjunction with Jens Hoffman, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.1 Whether it’s fair to allege institutional bias or merely assume kinship of taste, the works exude intelligence and confidence.
In a context where many artists employ digital print media, Elisheva Biernoff’s screen prints are strikingly refreshing. Extending her ongoing investigation of landscape, Biernoff presents a staggeringly labor-intensive, twenty-two-color, thirteen-page screen-printed book entitled Long Short Story (2011). The cover depicts a suburban enclave nestled in a riverside alpine meadow. The graphic simplicity of the forms, combination of muted tones and chirpy house colors, and understated American architecture recall nostalgic, idealized print images. This tranquility is humorously upset with a series of natural disasters—cut-out overlays—that afflict the neighborhood in quick succession. The low-slung ranch houses and Cape Cod cottages fall victim to floods, mudslides, asteroids, and sinkholes. Set against majestic snowy peaks, Long StoryShort speaks to our paradoxical relationship with nature and the undercurrent of vulnerability in this meteorologically extraordinary year.
Renée Gertler’s bag sculptures attempt to boil down the wonder of sublime nature to a few elements. Gertler photographed and re-constructed found bags—ranging from plastic shopping bags to Goldfish cracker packaging—from laser prints. They are portals in which to view meticulously punched starry skies reflected in plexiglass sheets. Second surface reflective materials occasionally present an undesirable visual stutter, which is the case in a few works here. Wonky construction seems at odds with the ethereal galaxies; nonetheless, the bags compel viewers to duck down to peer at the tiny universes that await them.
Gertler is known primarily for large sculptural installations in basswood; four small black-and-white photographs mark a subtler and more formal direction. Basswood reappears,
Elisheva Beirnoff. Long Story Short, 2011; screenprinted book; 10 x 12 in.; edition of 5 (1 AP). Courtesy of the Artist and Kala Gallery, Berkeley.
Renée Gertler. Black Bag: M81-Galaxy, 2011; laser print, plexiglass, and light; 12 x 14 x 3.75 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Kala Gallery, Berkeley.
encrusted with glitter, in Milky Way Model (2011). Dramatic lighting underscores an elemental sensibility, recalling the origins of the medium and associations with the pursuit of knowledge and perceptual limits. LA at Night (2011) is a stunning photograph of a backlit, perforated page. Here, the handmade idiosyncrasies make the photo more endearing, as it offers the pleasure of simultaneous recognition alongside the discovery of seeing something for the first time.
Like Gertler, Zachary Royer Scholz employs a photograph of crinkled paper, though Scholz’s work is better viewed as an installation of interventions or material manipulations. Alone, individual works can seem like exercises. 43.543.523.511 (shelf displacement) (2011) is as it sounds: the top of a shelf is lined with a photograph of an adjacent strip of concrete floor, while said strip is layered with white material, as if a shelf laminate. The work presents ontological questions: What is art? When does an artwork end or begin? What happens when one conflates the infrastructure of art display with objecthood? Viewers can gain a bit more traction when they consider the shelf piece in relationship to 564228.511 (crumple, crumple) (2011), in which a masterful photograph of crumpled brown paper has itself been wrinkled and placed atop a steel frame that suggests the form of a table. Both shelf and ersatz table shed utilitarian function in the process of becoming platforms for, or materials in, artworks. Viewing the crumpled photo is a perceptual exercise in the push-and-pull of actual and photographic space. The theme of perception resurfaces in 9.522.55111 (15 damaged retinas) (2011), a series of mounted and stacked ophthalmological scans. They conjure questions about opticality and its limitations.
Jennie Ottinger contributes four paintings of fictional characters and a short digital stop-motion animation (all 2011) of the figures enacting the romantic arc of Voltaire’s Candide. Ottinger’s brushstroke is both loose and accurate, exceptionally demonstrated in the handling of the tiny eyes and mouths used to convey dialogue and express emotions. These appear in the video and framed works off to the side, carrying the painter’s loose, improvisational process over into animation’s notoriously painstaking procedures and back into the display of two-dimensional works. A sense of process is established, as in a freeze frame of the artist’s desk. Painted on canvas paper, the cut-out figures are not unlike paper dolls—if activity books rendered characters in borderline grotesque, fleshy pinks.
Jessica Ingram’s series of eight photographs depict overgrown, neglected, and unintentionally chuckle-worthy corners of America. The residents are absent, yet their dreams and follies abound in signs, objects, and folk murals. Welcome to Utopia (2008) depicts how one missing letter can exemplify failure. This photo of a gap-toothed roadside sign welcoming visitors to “UTO_IA” is a modest testament to irony. Zap (2010) is a witticism about two abandoned, vacant spaces: a boarded-up house and a gutted arcade machine. Ingram’s pictures were coolly photographed, with impossibly large depth of field, between 2008 and 2010. The presentation of extant images on photo paper seems like a very straightforward use of media and equipment—particularly in comparison to the new techniques, directions, and forms embraced by Biernoff, Scholz, Gertler, and Ottinger.
By all accounts, World War I was an unprecedented catastrophe for Europe, and this fact needs to be taken into account when we look at any art made on that continent during the twenty-five years after the war’s conclusion. But in the case of the work of Kurt Schwitters, this fact it poses a unique problem for interpretation. I say this because the artistic responses to that war’s aftermath tended to align themselves with one of two camps. The first such camp was Dadaism’s program of so-called “anti-art,” which was really art that was against the art that supported the moral pretenses of a “high” civilization that masked the depraved ethics of industrial-scaled slaughter. The second came a bit later, and took the forms of Suprematism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, and Constructivism, all seeking to model the building of a better world based on clarified form and an efficient use of advanced materials. The artists participating in these movements were motivated by the thought that such efficiencies could ward off the recurrence of war by making its necessities a material and spiritual un-necessity. The fact that it only took a mere twenty years to see these articles of faith come to grief should go without saying, but this brings us back to Schwitters and the subsequent interpretation of his work amid that historical context: Dadaist, Constructivist, or both?
Judging from the exhibition titled Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage (originally organized by Isabel Schultz for the Menil Collection in Houston), the answer to this question is a decisive “maybe.” Working with a judicious selection of ninety-five two- and three-dimensional collage and assemblage objects taken from all phases of the artist’s career, the exhibition advances the idea that for Schwitters, collage was essentially a means of making paintings, or more precisely, objects that could suffice as proxies for paintings. The operational word here is “suffice,” and we will get to that momentarily, but first, we can linger on some of the works included in the exhibition. Schultz’s collage-as-painting thesis is born out by one of the earliest work in the exhibition, titled Merz Picture 1A (the Alienist)(1919).In it, we see the painted profile of a face set against a nocturnal blue, with hints of rainbows on the horizon. Atop this painterly world are set a few well-selected collage elements, including some circular ones that suggest thought bubbles. Here we see Schwitters reaching back to the Symbolist roots of Modernist abstraction, revealing a unique balance of painterly and collage elements.
In works created between 1920 and 1926, the years when Schwitters was most influenced by the Dadaist efforts in Berlin and Zurich, we see only occasional additions of paint to his collage elements. These were the years when he was most focused on his famous Merz pictures, “Merz” being a
made-up word that Schwitters derived from the German word kommerz, or “commerce” in English. Even though he wrote several essays about the concept of Merz, it is difficult to extract what he really intended by using the term, since his chosen art materials were at best tertiary by-products of commodity transactions that took place far from the moment of their artistic repurposing. What counts for the viewer is that repurposing, as witnessed in works such as Mz. 310 (Carnival) (1921) or Mz. 410. (Something or Other) (1922). The organization of graphic and pictorial elements in these collages is crisp in comparison to the earlier efforts, and their color is relatively upbeat. But we can still see a kind of vertigo in operation here, one that perfectly captures the dynamics of forms disintegrating outward while simultaneously reintegrating back toward the work’s center of pictorial gravity. It is this aspect of Schwitters’ oeuvre that seems to be such a worthy precedent for the current revival of abstract painting that we have seen during the past two years.
Schwitters’ work gradually grew away from its Dadaist influences, moving toward the abstract classicism that was advanced by Mondrian and other De Stijl artists. This trajectory is born out by works such as Körting Picture (1932), which seems eager to join the long parade of late Cubist artists that were active at the time. It is also born out by the artist’s longstanding project titled Merzbau (c. 1923–33), the transformation of his Hanover apartment into what has been proclaimed to be the first historical instance of installation art. Even though Allied bombers destroyed it in 1943, the Merzbau’s interior of abrupt diagonal white shapes and perversely skewed vitrines has lived on in photographic form. Peter Bissager rebuilt it from those photographs between 1981 and 1983, too late to be a part of the Museum of Modern Art’s gigantic Schwitters retrospective of 1985, but it is happily included in the exhibition under review. It was given its own gallery far away from the collage works, allowing viewers to see how Bissager rebuilt it like a movable stage, set to facilitate transport and storage. It doesn’t add much to the overarching thesis of the exhibition’s color and collage theme, but it is most certainly a rare and memorable trip down art history’s memory lane.
The all-too-predictable voices of art history snobs near and far will always try to remind us that collage was invented by Picasso near the end of 1911, and that the Cubist and Futurist artists were almost a full decade ahead of Schwitters’ earliest use of the technique. Even if true, how much should that really matter? Schwitters was clearly barking up a very different stylistic tree from those other artists, his work representing a kind of introspective lyric poetry more than an exercise in stylistic didacticism. When he is at his best, the touch that he brings to his materials is as clear and nuanced as that of a highly skilled painter, even as the world that his intimated by his work bespeaks of an inveterate dreamer.
Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage features over eighty works by the late German artist, including collages, mixed media pieces, paintings, sculptures, and an installation re-creating a section of the Merzbau, an immersive sculptural space that Schwitters built inside his Hannover home. Many of Schwitters’ collages—which he referred to as "Merz," a neologism that also served as the title of his independent art publication—famously include commercially or industrially manufactured printed matter, such as cigarette packaging, food ration stamps, news clippings, and other pieces of disposable paper. Part of Schwitters’ conception of Merz was that all material was art material, thus denying a distinction between the stuff of fine art practice and daily life. In some pieces, such as Merz 1926, 3. Cicero (1926), it is not uncommon to find both archival oil paint and broken household objects, visually unified through their specific color palettes and intentional compositions.
In light of this, it’s fitting that Schwitters’ life and art-merging strategies also resulted in unintentional works of process art, as his stand-alone collages and assemblages made of widely varied materials continue to age over the years. The oxidative darkening makes it harder to appreciate the subtle color relationships that must have existed between the elements of some works, but this deterioration has intensified the overall effect of others. For example, the composition of pink collage (1940) centers around a transparent wash of warm-colored pigment, the appearance of which is the result of the combined effect of the application of paint and the underlying tonality of the paper. Presumably once white or off-white, the paper has now yellowed, making the overall color more like a pale, blushing skin tone. The piece also bears mottling where the paper’s acidity has varied, setting off and highlighting its structured, geometric composition.
Arguably the most dramatic example of Merz as a practice was the Merzbau, a sculptural bricolage that Schwitters assembled from building materials and found objects inside his home in Hannover between the years 1923 and 1937, which he built again in Norway after he fled Germany during World War II. Both were eventually destroyed. Much like his collage pieces, the Merzbau was an intentionally ongoing project, and Schwitters never considered either space fully completed. As long as the artist inhabited each space, they were subject to additions, edits, and rearrangements. By contrast, Peter Bissegger’s reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (1981–1983), located on the museum’s ground floor gallery, presents one static version of the Hannover assemblage.
Consequently, the processes at work in reconstruction are less obvious because Bissegger’s primary intention is to resurrect an experience of place only possible in the past. Commissioned by the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, the project took two years to complete and is the result of exhaustive planning and design
Kurt Schwitters. Pink collage, 1940; collage, paper and tissue paper on pasteboard; 10 1/2 x 8 5/8 in. Courtesy of the David Ilya Brandt and Daria Brandt Collection and the UC Berkeley Art Museum.
efforts. Working from documentation photographs taken in 1933 (which hang near the installation), Bissegger reverse-engineered the measurements and angles of the plaster and wood construction. Like a detective working with forensic evidence, his efforts to correct for distortion and to calibrate his measurements even went so far as to track down the original camera and lens models caught in a reflection in the photos.1 Tiny light bulbs populate the emphatically angular space, helping to illuminate the myriad white geometric planes that meld and defy categories such as “architecture”, “furniture”, and “sculpture.”
But while Bissegger’s piece presents a thorough semblance of the interior of a section of the Hannover space circa 1933, it makes no attempts to hide the fact that it is a reconstruction. The raw plywood walls that form the piece’s exterior remain visible, as does the plastic sheeting that helps alter the space’s lighting scheme. Every few minutes, the light changes between a blue-cast exterior light source that simulates daylight streaming through windows, and a yellow-cast interior light that simulates what the space may have been like after dark; the light cycle of an entire day is collapsed into a few minutes. This ingenious theatrical device offers viewers a compacted sense of the subtle, ambient variances lighting introduced into the space, while also foregrounding the artifice of both the reconstruction and the original.
Schwitters drew inspiration from Cubism, punctuating the Merzbau with found objects and colored sections placed specifically to create visual relationships with the spaces around them. Because Bissegger’s recreation only partially replicates a section of one of the many rooms the original Merzbau occupied, large-scale prints blown up from the original photos have been pasted directly to the interior walls, indicating where the original space would have extended, but where the recreation ends. These images show viewers what they would have seen had they stood in the equivalent spot in the original, but also call attention to the fact that the piece is not the original by emphasizing the parts of the space that could not be recreated.
Though clearly Bissegger’s reconstruction has a specific art historical referent, his project lays bare the labor involved in creating a material simulation of an object that has been destroyed, at the same time underscoring the necessary incompleteness of such an endeavor. As the piece travels, it transplants a carefully crafted interpretation of the Merzbau—one in which a fixed state stands in to represent a fluctuating process—and makes it briefly available to geographically disparate audiences. Thus, the reconstruction can be thought of as a process-based artwork not only because of the research and construction that have gone into its fabrication, but also because of the ongoing maintenance necessitated by its continual transport and re-presentation.
In certain respects, this process mirrors Merz’s aesthetic of assemblage, even as the final product—the installation itself—attempts to circumvent the inevitable effects of time so apparent on the surfaces of older Schwitters pieces in the exhibit. Ultimately, with neither a static original nor a wholly intact version of the Merzbau remaining for comparison, Bissegger’s installationcryst engages in a form of immersive pedagogy (familiar from natural history museums, historical societies, and similar educational institutions) that overtly blends theater and scholarship.
The transformation of Pier 24 from an industrial warehouse to an upscale photography gallery aptly named Pier 24 Photography is immaculate. Exhibitions are free and open to the public, but the gallery requests that visitors schedule appointments in order to limit crowds and maintain a flawlessly “intimate environment.”1 The current exhibition, HERE., presents over seven hundred images spanning the San Francisco Bay Area’s distinguished photographic history. Yet in its pursuit of contemplative perfection, the gallery dilutes the nuanced layers and experimental inflection of the depicted landscapes and subcultures.
From afar, the renovated warehouse appears discreet in relation to the massive steel structure of the nearby Bay Bridge. Walking towards the front door, this powerful framing telescopes inward to a sectional view of the blue-green Bay water that is foregrounded by an alluring fragment of rusted railroad track. Once inside, the gallery host offers an exhibition guide with a somewhat vague map and list of participating artists, encouraging visitors to take advantage of the pure viewing experience instead of focusing on authorship.
Pier 24 Photography strives to present unique public exhibitions that omit interpretive wall texts and basic informational labels characteristic of art museums (that means no titles and no dates), thus enabling visitors to appreciate its breathtaking photography exhibitions on their own terms. However, thinking critically about the practice of “making things public” along the theoretical trajectories of Jürgen Habermas, Bruno Latour, and Miwon Kwon, how does this immaculate, ethereal, medium-specific architectural design and allegedly pure viewing environment translate into the inevitably stained and textured experiences of the diverse viewing public?2
When I walked through the exhibition HERE., I found many of the individual photographs to be stunning emblematic portraits of bygone and contemporary eras with exquisitely handled lighting, composition, and scale. Each of the twenty-two rooms within the gallery constitutes an exhibition unto itself, presenting either solo work or a small grouping of up to three related works.
Jim Goldberg. Raised By Wolves, 1989–1992; installation view, HERE., Pier 24, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist and Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco.
Todd Hido. House Hunting, 1996–2010; installation view, HERE., Pier24, 2011. Courtesy of the Artist and Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco.
I carefully searched for familiar places, faces, and signature styles, and rekindled my affection for work by artists like Eadweard Muybridge, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Henry Wessel, and the late Larry Sultan, whose superb Homeland (2007-2009) series deservingly anchors the show. I also experienced several artists’ work for the first time, including photographs by Todd Hido and Richard Misrach. Hido’s diffuse painterly studies of suburban night light were intriguing images of occupied, yet inactive space, while Misrach’s large format photographs cast an original perspective on iconic landscapes such as the Golden Gate Bridge, which he depicts as a miniature landmark amidst spectacular atmospheric conditions. However, the rectilinear exhibit design and absence of text—with its factual cues and emotive triggers about specific works on view—stifled rather than opened my sense of aesthetic fulfillment; simply put, I craved more.
One artist whose work managed to transgress the steady quietude of Pier 24 Photography and appease my expectations of courageous, cutting-edge, and experimental work in an exhibition of Bay Area photography was Jim Goldberg. Ephemeral sheets of looseleaf newsprint pinned to the wall, unframed and unpretentious, formed canvases for his large-scale portraits of homeless teens in San Francisco. Goldberg’s conscientious pairing of medium and image reflects the depth and duration of his work with this marginalized community. The photographs coalesce in the gallery like DIY flyers used to convey the intimacy and multiplicity of the public sphere. Newsprint is just one of several formats that Goldberg utilizes in his epic narrative series, Raised by Wolves (1989–1992). Other small-scale portraits on view are accompanied by captions that were handwritten by the very people whom he photograped. Here, the presence of text duly conveys the complex and layered subjectivity at work in documentary photography.
Yet, as it stands, the curatorial neutrality of Pier 24 Photography washes over the otherwise vibrant complexity of over seven hundred photographic works in HERE. Although, as a budding institution intent on making its collections public, Pier 24 may still find ways to develop an intimate and innovative form of exhibition. I suggest taking its cue from the work of Goldberg, engaging visitors as participating subjects in a collective debate over the photographic medium as a documentary tool that is also wrought with questions of surface, representation, bias, and truth.
HERE. is on view at Pier 24 Photography, in San Francisco, through December 16, 2011.
2. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Miwon Kwon, “Public Art as Publicity,” in In the Place of the Public Sphere? On the establishment of publics and counter-publics, ed. Simon Sheikh, Berlin: b_books, 2005, 22-33.
On the second floor of an old public building located next to the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, one can find the Museo Morandi, a dignified and modest exhibition space that is devoted to the work of Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964). Morandi has been widely regarded as the most important Italian painter of the twentieth century, an assertion that was confirmed by a major retrospective devoted to his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008. That exhibition garnered both praise and interest because of the way that the deeply considered, quiet, and introspective character of the Bolognese master’s work seemed to be such a welcome and uncanny retort to the noisy spectacle of contemporary-art-as-we-know-it. Morandi lived and worked all his life in Bologna, where, for many years, he taught etching at that city’s Accademia di Belle Arti. Although he made frequent visits to nearby Venice and Florence, in his latter years, he was something of a recluse. Now, over four decades after his death, his oddly eccentric still life compositions still attest to the fact that his legacy as the reigning master of painterly understatement and complex formal subtlety is fully intact. In so many ways, Morandi was a true painter’s painter, deeply ensconced in Italian art history. He was deeply aware of the crucial role that evocations of light and atmosphere play in slowing the viewer’s gaze to the point where pictorial nuance becomes the locus for an aesthetics of deep meditation.
Recently, the Museo Morandi invited Wayne Thiebaud to exhibit fifteen smaller works alongside eleven by Morandi in two of its intimate galleries. The exhibition was curated by Alessia Masi with Carla Crawford and is designed to set up close side-by-side comparisons between the two artists. For example, one of Morandi’s trademark groupings of humble crockery paired with geometrically skewed blocks of cheese in a 1956 painting simply titled Natura morta is set up next to one of Thiebaud’s signature works titled Cheese Wedges (2011). The latter work shows blocks of cheese set on a deli counter with plastic price tags affixed to them. In another instance, one of Thiebaud’s landscape paintings of the Sacramento River delta from the late 1980s is positioned next to one of the landscapes that Morandi painted during the single year that he fled Bologna (1944) owing to the danger posed by nearby military hostilities. The works by Thiebaud exemplify all phases of his long career, and almost all of the works in this exhibition are small, making for intimate visual encounters that seduce a viewer’s eye. Generally, such pairings seem focused on similarities of subject matter, but there are also some obvious formal similarities, such as the backgrounds formulated out of almost flat color that isolate the foreground objects amid intentionally indistinct environments.
The real interest provoked by this exhibition lies in how it reveals the differences between the two painters, and by this, I do not mean that it stages any competitive confrontation, only a very intelligent contrast of sensibility and pictorial priority. Clearly, the most noticeable of these differences is color, and this alone could be the subject of a long philosophical essay. Thiebaud’s color is richly informed by the late modern chromatics of Pop Art and Color-Field painting and is more distantly derived from the work of Matisse and Bonnard. Morandi’s work is much more about tonality, atmospheric subtlety, and the fleeting tangibility of the way that edges between masses of color define form.
Wayne Thiebaud at Museo Morandi, installation view, Museo Morandi, 2011. Courtesy of Museo Morandi, Bologna.
Cheese Wedges, 2011; oil on canvas; 18 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco.
These attributes connect Morandi’s work to certain well-known examples of classical Asian painting, such as the famous Six Persimmons,painted by Mu Ch’i in the thirteenth century. This observation underscores the dreamy evanescence of Morandi’s work, and it also leads viewers to how Morandi’s still lifes differ from those of Cézanne, he being the only modern artist whom Morandi admired without equivocation. Cézanne’s objects revel in a tangibility derived from a synthesis of visual look and tactile touch. On the other hand, Morandi’s seem almost as if they were captured as reflections in a placid pool of water, on the verge of a kind of disappearance if and when any turbulence might enter the scene.
This distinction bears on Thiebaud’s still lifes because they live in yet another perceptual space that is informed by very tight gestalts that give way to small festivals of sugary color that delight the eye. Thiebaud’s work has often been discussed in the context of the Pop Art that is historically contemporaneous with it, but in truth, it is much more of a piece with the paintings of Edward Hopper; it represents a realism that is almost self-consciously American in character. His still life objects are all examples of American-style acquireability that are redeemed and given special dignity by way of his deft painterly touch, which is one that does get to the pictorial point rather quickly (compared to Morandi), but not too quickly and not as quickly as is the case with most Pop Art. Take, for example, Thiebaud’s painting of a trio of bubble-gum dispensers titled Three Machines (1963). The machines are almost identical, although Thiebaud does bathe them in slightly different light. What one notices first is their fire-engine-red color, and then we see their multichromatic contents. Only after the sugar rush subsides do we note the regimented placement of the machines, vexingly equidistant from each other as well as the outer edges of the composition. Such compositional regimentation is a constant feature of Thiebaud’s work, especially through the ’70s, and it seems like an oblique nod to the idea of serial imagery that was thought to be so original in the early years of that decade. But Thiebaud’s work is more clever than that, in that he often contradicts his serial deployments of objects with sharp cast shadows rendered in complementary colors, implying that his objects are defined by strong raking light
While thinking about the aesthetic relationships between this pair of painters, I walked over to the school where Morandi taught, hoping to stumble upon some insight gleaned from the artist’s immediate environment. My visit to the school failed to provide me with any such thing, but a visit to the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna located next door proved fruitful. I imagined that this would be the place that Morandi would go on a break between classes, if only to beat Bologna’s beastly summertime heat. I tried to see the things to which Morandi would have paid special attention. As luck would have it, the Pinacoteca has three galleries full of old fresco paintings, one containing a half dozen that are unfinished and two more containing others that had fallen into disrepair. Here we see it all—ghostly forms limned out in whispering pale colors, intimations of what was or what might have been, half-mute ghosts that seem strangely alive and vexingly foreign to any “let’s get to the point” type of thinking. As is true with Morandi’s tabletop cosmologies, the only way to come to terms with this fresco collection is to silently sit there and let them slowly form themselves into consciousness. This is slow art at its best, and in our own moment of manic velocity, at its most uncanny as well.
Wayne Thiebaud at Museo Morandi is on view at Museo Morandi, in Bologna, through October 2, 2011.
Ultimately arguing that it is time to expand both what art can be and what we can be, art and cultural critic Brian Holmes coined the term eventwork, which he defines as a “fourfold matrix of contemporary social movements” that utilize art, research, media, and organizing.1 The first image Holmes presented to the audience at a July 23, 2011 talk on the subject was of Graciela Carnevale’s 1968 El encierro(The Confinement).The artist chained shut the door of a gallery in Rosario, Argentina with a group of spectators gathered inside waiting for something to happen. Then she left. The group pressed closely together realized they were the something that was happening, and a few hours passed in the closed space. According to Holmes, it was someone on the outside who finally broke a hole in the gallery’s plate-glass storefront window to allow people out. The Confinement was part of the larger art event(work) Tucumán Arde (Tucumán is burning), an action aimed at providing “counter information” to raise awareness, in the wake of brutal repression from the military dictatorship of the Revolución Argentina and under conditions of widespread use of government propaganda, about conditions in the impoverished interior province of Tucumán, Argentina.2 For Holmes, Tucumán Arde represents the most impressive example of eventwork from the 1960s.
Holmes' talk took place at Mildred's Lane, a "complexity" that might also be described as an artists' residence, art school, and social practice project in rural Pennsylvania founded by J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion. During the summer months of the last few years, several sessions of talks, workshops, meals, and collaborative art projects have been assembled around themes created by Puett and Dion or other collaborators. The sessions are attended and run by staff, visiting artists, curators, theorists, chefs, and groups of student fellows. On specially ordained “Social Saturdays” the general public is also invited to attend dinners and talks that take place on the grounds and in a renovated barn-cum-lecture hall.
Claire Pentecost and Brian Holmes talk with "Drift" fellows in the barn at Mildred's Lane. Photo: Mildred's Lane, Pennsylvania.
J. Morgan Puett presents to Claire Pentecost, Brian Holmes, and "Drift" fellows in the barn at Mildred's Lane. Photo: Mildred's Lane, Pennsylvania.
The third session of this summer’s season is presented and facilitated by Claire Pentecost and Brian Holmes on the theme of “Drift,” an extension and elaboration on the project and seminar series “Continental Drift,” which they have been leading at sites including 16 Beaver Group in New York; Zagreb, Croatia; and the Midwest for nearly a decade. The focus on maps, territories, and the “scales of our existence” is joined at Mildred’s Lane by an examination of bodies of water that cross boundaries.3 The nearby Delaware River is currently under dire threat of pollution if plans are carried out to use hydraulic fracturing in order to harvest natural gas from underground rock layers. A need to find alternative and domestic sources of energy and a hope for economic revitalization in the region make the plan attractive to some. The action, however, poses not only a local threat of pollution but could also potentially contaminate drinking water for Philadelphia and New York City. Where the economic, environmental, and political ramifications drift—sometimes literally down the river—beyond the scope of the local and across conceptual and physical boundaries, it offers an especially urgent example of a phenomenon that exists at multiple scales: intimate, territorial, national, continental, and global. After running through examples of eventworks more recent than Tucumán Arde, including the Arab Spring and the recent occupations of squares in Wisconsin and Greece, Holmes closed the talk by encouraging the audience to participate in the August 6 Slow Float, organized by the local SkyDog Projects in conjunction with a slew of other organizations, including Mildred’s Lane. During this day of outdoor recreation, art, and political activism, participants will drift down the Delaware in a continuing effort to raise awareness about the value of clean water and the perils of fracking.
Immediately following the talk, artist Silvia Kolbowski stated that it is most important for her to look at the limits of art rather than its expansive possibilities. Preferring to thwart the boundary between artwork and political work, curator Nato Thompson framed his primary questions in terms of manipulation of affect (and therefore power), insisting that this is the key dynamic involved in each. Artist and writer Gregg Bordowitz asked for a consideration of the role of affect in the possibilities of new subject production. No conclusions reached, the questions raised about developing alternative forms of information flow and finding a better articulation of society continued to eddy around the territories and boundaries of art, politics, and life, and the possibilities for a close crowd in a room (or a barn) to find a way to forge new routes without waiting for someone on the outside to throw a rock.
“Drift” takes place at Mildred’s Lane, in Pennsylvania, through August 7, 2011.
________ NOTES:
1. Brian Holmes, “Drift,” (lecture, Mildred’s Lane, Beach Lake, PA, July 23, 2011).
2. Luis Camnitzer, “Tucumán arde” in Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), p. 60–72.
Mouthing (The Sentient Limb), a group show at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center, strives to utilize the phenomenological potential of art, the place where knowledge and awareness are experienced through sensory perception rather than objective inquiry. Organized around the idea of the “phantom limb,” a phrase used to describe lingering sensation from an amputated appendage, curator Kelly Kaczynski’s attempt to create a high-minded, sensually rich investigation into the mysterious corners of psychic dissonance is grossly underserved by the art presented. From piece to piece, I found it difficult to meet the artists on their terms and experience the work as it was intended.
What could possibly be an older debate within the history of art than the contest between reason and emotion? If Mouthing is meant as a polemical statement for the cause of sensation, or even as a milder testimonial to the peculiar power of human feeling, then certain pieces by the exhibition’s thirteen artists verge on self-parody through weak or dull execution.
Cameron Crawford’s installation in /blind /stand. (2009) artificially heats a small private gallery within the otherwise air-conditioned halls of the Art Center. Crawford’s warm room may have seemed like an unusual feat were it not for the curiously decorated twenty-eight-by-thirty-six-by-eight-inch white aluminum box with an extension cord streaming out of it that is placed against the room’s interior wall. It’s difficult to parse Crawford’s intentions here. Is the climate of the room meant to have an uncanny effect upon those experiencing it? If so, why make the heat source so conspicuous? Though I don’t know what is in the mystery box, I would hazard a guess that it is some sort of small appliance that uses electricity and generates heat. Adorned with prominent rivets and stylized radiation panels, the box itself is hardly interesting enough to command its position as the primary focal point within the installation. The obviousness of the piece could, perhaps, be interpreted as an ironic statement in which in /blind /stand. challenges the experiential promise of illusory art. But given the thesis of the show, this interpretation is likely to be unintentional.
Crawford is not the only artist plagued by dubious objectives. Julia Klein’s fragmented limb sculptures teeter between rudimentary ritualistic objects and failed assignments from
Cameron Crawford. in /blind /stand., 2009; primed, painted and smudged aluminum, electrical parts, extension cord; 28 x 36 x 10 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.
Mouthing (The Sentient Limb), installation view, Hyde Park Art Center, 2011. Front: Yun Jeong Hong, AntiOedipus, 2010. Back: Julia Klein, Legs (Good Old P.A.), 2010. On wall: Melanie Schiff, Ghost, 2010. Courtesy of the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.
Sculpture 101. Nose (2011) is a crude blue and brown nose pyramid made of clay and glue, while Legs (Good Old P.A.) (2010), made from two-by-fours, resembles two splayed legs resting against the wall. Here, ubiquitous materials like painted clay, tape, and wood are incapable of transcending themselves.
Negligible material use also detracts from Dani Leventhal’s Untitled (Beaver) (2010). Waxy blood and other viscera splashed across a piece of art store–quality drawing paper are the gruesome remnants of a violent act—the skinning of a beaver. Again, the use of materials here subverts the potential for a broader reading. The paper and the small beaver drawing rendered over the bloodstain betray hints of anxiety in the conception of the piece. Of all the things that could have been used as a substrate, why drawing paper? A drop cloth, butcher paper, or any number of other surfaces could have given the piece the quality of a ready-made object. Regardless of the material, the final result would have been understood as a drawing and also as something more than a gallery-ready art piece. On the paper, it is only a drawing. Leventhal seems concerned that without traditional materials, the piece might not be accepted as art. Perhaps he is also hopeful that his choice of materials will grant him artistic license to dull the ethical controversy behind the act of skinning an animal. With greater conviction, the artist’s work could have become something more than a half-hearted provocation.
Thankfully, a small handful of pieces offer some hope. Melanie Schiff’s Ghost (2010) is easily one of the best works in the show. Her melancholy black-and-white image of a slightly blurred wind chime suggests the relationship between sound and memory. To view Schiff’s picture is to be transported beyond the gallery walls to a windy back porch, or some other place from a viewer’s past where a distinct emotional experience was accompanied by softly clinking metal. David Gracie’s photorealistic oil painting Ice Cube (2011) also bridges the gap between sensory perception and cognitive awareness. Similar to sixteenth-century still-life paintings of flower arrangements, Gracie’s unmelted ice cube is a portrait of temporality. Erin O’Brien’s drawing Mountain (head) (2010) has an unassuming, whimsical quality capable of marrying states of mind to features within the landscape or dreamscape. At the very least, these three pieces illustrate the potential of art driven by sensory perception.
But a couple of well-executed pieces cannot save an entire show. I left the gallery with many questions. Unfortunately, they were more about the reasoning behind ill-conceived art pieces than the nature of human experience.
Mouthing (The Sentient Limb) is on view at the Hyde Park Art Center, in Chicago, through October 16, 2011.
For the Living Arts Fund’s curatorial debut, founder and director Betty Nguyen presents an exhibition of collage-based work, not in the large storefront gallery, which won’t open until the fall, but in her apartment on the second floor. Dubbed the LAF Salon, it suits the live–work style of this chic, well-networked blonde who runs her funky flat in the out of the way Excelsior district—where, Nguyen muses, “the Mission ends and the ocean is palpable”—as if it were on the Left Bank. There’s no mistaking the building on this quiet block of otherwise non-descript row houses: a dark, glitzy ’70s–style monolith with a cantilevered façade in shaded glass and aged redwood. This is LAF’s first headquarters since it started producing peripatetic exhibitions and events around town in the early 2000s; its mission includes funding artists’ proposals through occasional “Sunday Soups” and grander schemes, such as developing new systems for delivering art to the public.
As the title Welcome to the New Old Times insinuates with its strains of the vaudevillian, collage has a way of continually reincarnating itself. Born in the Paris of Picasso and Braque, it has weathered the Beat generation and Vietnam and currently enjoys a paste-free renaissance in our digital, interdisciplinary age. An up-to-the-minute example here is Publicity Reform (all works 2011 unless otherwise noted), a black-and-white digital collage resembling a warped Jean Dubuffet painting by Los Angeles–based artist Luke Fischbeck, co-founder of the band Lucky Dragons and the collaborative drawing group the Sumi Ink Club. Made by shredding and successively scanning campaign posters, one contemplates the work while listening to the accompanying track of abstract music.
The curating is collagist as well—plus a little Cagean, too. Or perhaps “potluck” would be more apropos, as Nguyen brings
Dave Muller. Cats, 1999-2000; set of six collages and altered book. Courtesy of the Artist and Living Arts Fund, San Francisco.
Charlie Callahan. Bridge Jumpers, 2011; collage; 44 x 37 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Living Arts Fund, San Francisco.
people and their confections to the table from all corners of her international multimedia network, many of who do not normally make fine art. The musician Evan Caminiti, of the drone noise band Barn Owl, made an impression with his talismanic, shrinelike NadaBrahma (2008), in which twigs, lichen, and cassette tape tangled with human hair and a nonplussed Buddha statuette in their midst appear to explode from the speaker base. The work’s relationship to his music is clear. Other newcomers to the gallery circuit include Brian Roettinger, an award-winning designer of album covers from Los Angeles; Jacinto Astiazarán, a filmmaker from Mexico City, and his boyfriend, Abdi Taslimi; and Kyoung Kim, a Korean-American, London-based writing student pursuing a PhD at Goldsmith’s. Even their lesser efforts contribute to the atmosphere of easy-going experimentation among friends.
Oddly enough, the only piece that plays with the domestic setting is Kim’s chunky rope ladder, Dear Gabriele (2011), which dangles from the kitchen skylight. It is woven from torn bedcovers and a suicide note that the artist found in her London flat; a copy of the note, written in Italian, accompanies the installation.
Hung in the hallway, emerging Bay Area artist Charlie Callahan channels Bruce Conner with Bridge Jumpers (2011), a collage of yellowed vintage photos and newspaper clippings visible behind the lacy wings of double blue Rorschach forms spray painted on the plexiglass frame. Better-known Bay Area artist Laurie Reid, collaborating with newcomer Ben Echeverria, presents a wall-mounted assemblage. A giant mirror and plexiglass icicle function as a kind of crutch supporting a diamond shaped redwood stretcher housing a delicate drawing. The work, In the Middle of Nowhere on the Way to Somewhere (2011), teeters between two and three dimensions, geometric balance and organic collapse. It would have fared better, however, without the white leather sofa below it scraping the tip of the icicle and Roettinger’s floppy unframed silkscreen hung next to it.
Nguyen builds the show around a charming 1999 suite of found cat pictures by Dave Muller, referred to as another misto “DJ/artist,” who is the box office draw here. In a creepy adaptation that Tim Burton would approve of, all seventeen cats have been equipped with new eyes: those rattling black and white googly eyes worn by stuffed animals. Muller looks pleasingly scrappy again in this mixed company of strays, polymaths, and up-and-comers. Like Muller’s feline subjects, everyone here looks and acts a little different when under the influence of collage.
Welcome to the New Old Times is on view at the Living Arts Fund's LAF Salon in San Francisco through August 23, 2011.
Accepting that the regional survey is a flawed form and that any attempt at taking an artistic pulse or defining the Zeitgeist is fraught with the pitfalls of personal (curatorial) prejudice or preference and institutional constraints, Bay Area Now 6 (BAN6) still manages to hit a few nails on the head. The curators present a diverse, gender-balanced overview of local art practitioners that spans the spectrum from emerging (Ben Venom) to established (Tony Labat). The exhibition offers a variety of works across media. It strives to identify trends and themes. And it looks okay, too, for the most part. This is partly due to a streamlined number of artists—eighteen in total—that is very welcome after the cacophony of BAN5, which for many, including myself, was a low moment, possibly the lowest, in fact, in the recent history of Bay Area Now surveys. It’s also due to a well-paced installation in the lower level galleries that unfortunately somewhat runs out of steam upstairs. There, works by Tammy Rae Carland, Mauricio Ancalmo, and Amy Balkin remain marooned in their own concerns, falling victim to an awkward constellation of walls and corridors, which ends on a seeming afterthought—the boxed-in light installation by Chris Fraser.
Nonetheless, overall the exhibition struck me, at least visually, as an earnest enough attempt to weave the threads and strands of individual practices into a tapestry both celebrating and “inspired by the local social and geographic environment,” according to the exhibition poster. Although with six stated “areas of influence” mentioned—food, futurism, environment, community activism, radical identities, and technology—the pattern, to continue the metaphor, was often a little too busy for my taste. There were a number of artworks that I found interesting, such as Tammy Rae Carland’s staged photographs of stand-up comediennes in comic repose; Ben Venom’s outsize Medusa-head quilt fashioned from heavy metal paraphernalia; and Chris Sollars’ refreshingly bizarre and hirsute multimedia installation, to name a few. There were also artworks that I thought less successful. This seems like a fairly balanced, perhaps even predictable response up until this point, and yet I left the exhibition beset by a peculiar, unprecedented feeling of melancholy. Doubtlessly due in part to the omnipresent minor-key strains of Ancalmo’s “dualing” pianos, this sense was compounded by the majority of the works themselves, which jointly and individually radiated an overpowering historical nostalgia.
For it would appear from this exhibition that the mores, aesthetics, and socio-politics of nineteenth-century America are now up for grabs in the pursuit of a kind of alter-reality, or alter-modernity, to borrow from French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud. In his introduction to the 2009 Tate Triennial catalogue, Bourriaud claims that artists today seem to have “turn[ed] cultural nomad[s].” And further, that their activities constitute a kind of “Baudelairean flânerie through geographical, historical and socio-cultural realities.” Ranu Mukherjee’s video color of history – sweating rocks (2011) and her ongoing Nomadic Archive project (2006- ) can be seen as the obvious poster child for this trend. The video work features adept animation, a techno-futuristic soundtrack, and inventive forms (Bedouins merging into rocks that seep oil, etc.) with the intent of highlighting the plight of the peoples of the Sahara, who have been displaced by oil-mining, as well as displaced refugees more generally. Like Bourriaud’s nomadic artists, Mukherjee creates a new vocabulary out of a mélange of “realities.” And in his opinion, the sum of these parts is an attempt to get the forward-looking impulse of modernity back on track.
Tammy Rae Carland, I'm Dying Up Here (Upside Down), 2010; color photograph; 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.
Richard T. Walker, The Speed and Eagerness of Meaning, 2011; three-channel HD installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles
By contrast, most of the other BAN6 artists, although grazing cross-historically and culturally, seem to espouse a regurgitated, reconstituted past. The impetus of their work points backward. The evidence is in the anachronistic elements at play in Allison Smith’s collages of Colonial-era oddities and ornaments and her teetering pyre of wooden objects both functional and decorative; in Chris Sollars’ dandy/woodsman with his verdantly bushy beard; in Sean McFarland’s neo-gothic, darkly sublime, under-exposed photographs of grottoes and forests; and in Richard T. Walker’s Romantic desert minstrel. The latter two in particular evoke the Victorian era’s love of the medieval, constituting another layer of historical reference. While our time does indeed seem to be “out of joint,” to quote Weston Teruya quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the title of his installation Time is out of joint: (or haunting the future city) (2011), not one of the artists here seems compelled, like Hamlet, “to set it right.”1
The vertiginous sense of déjà vu and Baroque (over)complexity includes titles—for example, Dualing Pianos: Agapé, Agape in D Minor (2011) (note pun on “Dualing” for extra mileage), Ancalmo’s reference to twentieth-century author William Gaddis’s novella, which itself owes much to the writings of Plato on the subject of brotherly love in The Republic. It also extends to the tweaking of art historical tropes and twentieth-century artists. Holland Cotter, in his review of the 2010 Whitney Biennial for the New York Times, identifies “the art of the tweak” as “minute variations on conventional forms and historical styles.”2 Is Brion Nuda Rosch’s installation an attempt to out-Brancusi the master in pursuit of new sculptural forms or perhaps the presentation of the perfect studio environment? Or do his historicized and generic totems remain in the realm of purely emulative mishmash—part Brancusi, part any other type of geometric three-dimensional abstractions? Robert Minervini’s large-format paintings contain the elements of Dutch Baroque, collage, montage, Surrealism, and Pop Art familiar from Matthias Weischer’s paintings, translated through a West Coast palette and array of references. But by giving us Buckminster Fuller instead of Walther Gropius, is he on to something or merely reprising the Leipzig School art star’s temporal and architectural pastiches in a different key? In the recent British mockumentary The Trip (2010), Rob Brydon responds to fellow comedian Steve Coogan’s complaint that one of his ideas has been “done before” by claiming, “It’s 2010. Everything’s been done before. All you can do is do something that someone’s done before but do it better or different.” To a certain level, then, repetition is unavoidable. But familiarity can breed contempt. Ay, there’s the rub (Hamlet, again).3
Despite all the history, the weakest point of the exhibition for me is its attempted validation by reference to art historical precedents from the ’60s and ’70s, and it would seem to have been wiser to remain evasive about any perceived relationships to specific conceptual lineages. For example, Tammy Rae Carland’s photographs are described in the attendant exhibition poster as “fueled by the energy of 1960s-era feminism.” Appearing decidedly un-energetic (the series is titled I’m Dying Up Here [2010]), they also seem to be related more to a second wave of feminism and performance, which, while doubtlessly informed by its ’60s forebears, has evolved in irony, subtlety, and relevance to our contemporary social situation. Nuda Rosch’s and Sollars’ works are done a similar disservice by being located within a trajectory of Bay Area conceptualism on the basis of “embracing the potential of discarded objects.”4 This claim could as easily mark them as “eco-artists” as it overlooks the distinguishing feature of Bay Area Conceptualism, as represented by artists such as Tom Marioni and Howard Fried or Tony Labat—its experimental approach to new forms, media, and platforms for artists.
Our times must be very bleak indeed if all that artists can draw from them are the tools with which to entrench themselves in the past. Thankfully, there are moments of light relief to be had at key junctures in the exhibition. Labat’s green neon marijuana leaf greets visitors upon entering the building, and Carland’s photographs preface both upstairs and downstairs segments. Irony. Subtlety. Economy. I think it’s probably the dearth of these qualities that made for what on balance was a melancholy viewing experience.
1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” (I.v.188-9).
2. Holland Cotter, “At a Biennial on a Budget, Tweaking and Provoking,” New York Times, February 25, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/arts/design/26biennial.html?pagewanted=all.
3. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, “To sleep, perchance to dream- ay, there's the rub.” (III.i.68).
Currently on view at Electric Works, Elaine Buckholtz’s Light Making Motion: Works on Paper and in Light is an exhibition of prints, kinetic and interactive sculptures, and video installation that coheres into a single meditation on the activity of seeing.
Out of the works included, Buckholtz’s pigment prints are the most austere. Displaying banded streaks of yellows, reds, browns, and greens, like those made by dragging an image along the glass of a scanner, Luminary Cascade (2011) and Vertical Creme (2011) are installed in simple, natural wood frames that recall Electric Works’ parquet floor. Employing a technique used by Minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd, both sets of multiple prints are neatly arranged in vertical stacks, working the frames themselves into the striped pattern. The bottom-most frame in Luminary Cascade (2011) even rests on the floor, directly engaging the visual line created by the corner.
Linear Shadowbox (2011) is a print of a similarly striped pattern, made on a transparent material and mounted in a custom-made display box. Enabling the print to loop in three dimensions, this presentation directly incorporates the visible walls and works in the space on either side of the piece, creating a situation in which a viewer’s movement and vantage point produce color and tonal interactions between different parts of the print itself.
Addressing the visual experience of the space directly, Reflecting Buoy (2011) is a curvilinear oblong piece of mirrored plexiglass rotating eccentrically around a weathered, almost decrepit, nautical buoy. Suspended from exposed structural beams, it makes crazy, fun-house distortions of the floor, walls, and any viewers in its range, creating a pleasantly disorienting experience for a person standing below it and looking straight up. The buoy, true to its original function, serves as a sturdy visual constant in an otherwise mercurial field of view.
Lined up along the gallery windowsill, though mostly left off from the exhibition check list, is a collection of found flashlights, lenses, a spyglass, and a lantern. Each has a patina of actual use and history, and all embody technologies for directing light in the interest of improving human vision. Set up in this context, My 100-year-old Whiskey (2011) clearly invites a viewer to look through it. The piece is made of an antique surveyor’s tripod, an exposed crank assembly, and a cubic block of shimmering material whose refractory surfaces isolate vivid, translucent techno-colors. Its disjunction of
Spinning Night in Living Color, 2011; archival pigment print and 2-channel video loop; edition of 3; 40 x 140 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Electric Works, San Francisco.
My 100-year-old Whisky, 2011; lens, surveyor's tripod, crank mechanism; 42 x 30 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Electric Works, San Francisco.
materiality is compelling: the nostalgic creakiness of the tripod comparatively makes the little cube a piece of science fiction, something from the future, beautiful but strange. Cranking the handle, it spins to show the room behind it, also reflecting one’s own face.
The piece Optical Tuning Devices (2011) similarly requires a viewer’s active investigation. Made from aged wood and new aluminum piping, it includes mysterious objects, and looking through them is less like playing with a toy than like using a microscope. Through one end they show an anodized rainbow haze, but through the other end there is an illusory series of concentric light and dark rings, a paradoxical trick of the pipe fittings maybe, but a subtle reminder that vision is not a logical experience.
Another presentation of illusion, Spinning Night in Living Color (2011) is an elegant video installation that appears instead to be a thick, striped, translucent substance, set like an aquarium into the wall and illuminated by a moving light source from behind. The bottom edge of the two-channel projection is calibrated a slight distance from the bottom of the unframed pigment prints pasted directly to the wall, creating an intuitive but false judgment of depth. In both the video and the print, slippery colors and tones—including, by no accident, the orange of Electric Works’ interior structural beams—shift and interact to create a sense of human-paced movement. A low, undulating ambient soundtrack suggests doubt, as if subliminally asking, “Do you know what you are looking at? How do you know?”
Building on a Minimalist interest in integrating the entire gallery space into the work, Light Making Motion further investigates the experience of vision as a phenomena unfolding in time, using both formal and temporal repetition to focus attention on shifting, fleeting, elusive sensations. Together, the works serve to distinguish between mental perceptions, parsed together from visual information, and sensation itself, which can at once be pleasurable, ambiguous, and strange. Buckholtz is a generous guide, making instructive objects that allow her audience to come to these discoveries at its own pace.
Light Making Motion: Works on Paper and in Light is on view at Electric Works, in San Francisco, through August 20, 2011.
It is surprisingly rare to see a show that actually describes a particular tendency in contemporary artistic production and its relationship to the past. Presumably this would be the goal of any group show, but connecting the dots to form a cohesive whole is harder than it sounds. Forms and Inflections makes an interesting case for contemporary artists (many of whom are remarkably young) who extend the lineage of 1960s and ’70s Minimalism and Op Art and, to an extent, Conceptual Art. The exhibition features seven contemporary artists working in diverse media—Christopher Badger, Aspen Mays, Hayal Pozanti, Florian and Michaël Quistrebert, Sean Raspet, and Hugh Scott-Douglas—along with Stanley Brouwn, a lesser-known Conceptual artist who began working in the ’70s and whose inclusion here acts as a historical anchor for the exploration of particular current trends. The visual interplay between each piece, ranging from the monumental to the modest and grouped to underscore particular themes, is the exhibition’s greatest strength.
The central thesis of the show is found in the last line of its press release: “At once subversive and formally seductive, [the pieces on view] prove to be less about the allure of regularity than the unexpected poetry of its breakdown.” While the Minimalists of the ’60s and ’70s sought to capture pure form as dictated by strict systems and patterns, the well-edited selection of pieces in Forms and Inflections cleverly pokes, prods, refracts, offsets, and pulls apart these aesthetic and historical precedents in a tasteful installation that perfectly fits the proverbial white cube of Silverman Gallery. While some of the artists illustrate this “breakdown” by foregrounding form and through material experimentation, others use visual phenomena as metaphors for other kinds of failure.
Clearly in the former camp is the Quistreberts’ wallpaper piece Lingelbach Grid Illusion (after the Hermann Grid Illusion) (2011), an exercise in total optical disorientation. Similarly the nearby candy-colored, micro-mesh, and muslin canvases of Scott-Douglas utilize the particular properties of their materials to create a wonky optical effect in a manner that would have pleased Dan Flavin and Eva Hesse alike. Also included in this subgroup is the Quistreberts’ static video Stripes (2011), aptly shown on a blockish monitor that sits on the floor like a monolithic Minimalist sculpture.
Several artists employ the visual manipulation of fixed systems as a metaphor for other kinds of collapse or atrophy. Raspet’s Three Inflections (2009–2010), whose title partially provides the show’s own, lyrically illustrates the idea of unhinging one of the most basic systems that ground us in well-ordered and clearly organized “reality”—in this case, time—through visually disorienting means. Raspet has
Forms and Inflections, installation view, Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, 2011. Left to right: Hugh Scott-Douglas, Untitled, 2011; Florian & Michaël Quistrebert, Lingelbach Grid Illusion (after the Hermann Grid Illusion), 2011 (wallpaper); Florian & Michaël Quistrebert, Stripes, 2011 (video); Sean Raspet, Three Inflections, 2009-2010; Hayal Pozanti, A Closed System of Surveillance, 2010 (foreground). Courtesy of Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.
Forms and Inflections, installation view, Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, 2011. Left to right: Aspen Mays, Punched Out Stars, 2011; Sean Raspet, Startup, 2011; Christopher Badger, Geometric Constructions of Antiquity, 3, 4, 5, 15, 2011. In case: various works by Stanley Brouwn. Courtesy of Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.
refashioned three standard-looking wall clocks into stunning, wall-mounted sculptures; their complex layers of two-way mirrored plexiglass resemble haphazard stacks of paper or razor-sharp glass flowers in various stages of bloom. They make impossible the simple act of telling time. Mays contributes four delicate photographic pieces in the series Punched Out Stars (2011), which (like beloved conceptual photography of the ’70s) is exactly what it sounds like. The effect is poetic and subtle but clear: absence, in both senses of the word. Both Raspet’s clocks and Mays’ photographs obscure and abstract our view of their subjects; obfuscation itself becomes their subject matter.
The show’s other pieces also reward careful consideration as virtually every one is a standout. Pozanti’s A Closed System of Surveillance (2010) feels like a classic Conceptual Art gag that never stops being clever: a tight circle of spray-painted Mylar balloons is fixed to the floor, creating a ring of balloon mirrors within balloon mirrors. This reflective ring is smartly installed near Raspet’s clock nightmare, establishing distorted reflection as a broader visual and conceptual theme. Badger’s beautifully precise chalk drawings Geometric Constructions of Antiquity, 3, 4, 5, 15 (2011) explore different permutations of basic geometric shapes, replacing systematic composition with the pure beauty of intuition.
The only work that sits apart from the rest is that of Brouwn, both because it is necessarily quarantined in a glass case and because of its art historical precedence. Brouwn’s work is presented really more as a reference point: his artist’s books and postcard pieces sit impotently in a glass case, falling victim to the usual problem of displaying now-valuable objects once meant to be handled and flipped through. The works included—particularly his best-known This Way Brouwn (1960), books of quirky maps drawn by strangers whom the artist solicited for directions, a project begun in the ’60s—act as a counterpoint to the more straight-ahead interpretations of systems and formalism throughout the rest of the show. Brouwn’s work records physical distances between people and places (sometimes to an absurd degree) and deals with the natural oscillation between the precision and intuition in the ways people navigate space. Unfortunately, none of this is discernible, given the constraints of how his pieces are displayed.
Still, Forms and Inflections makes clear the connections between ’60s and ’70s giants and the young artists who work in their wake today. The show’s premise points toward the very origins of systems theory and the way information is organized, which fascinated Minimalists and contemporary artists alike, and which has resulted in a digital revolution that has stretched from around 1970 into the present moment. Ultimately this show leaves unanswered the question of how our immersion in the digital age has affected art practice. In turn, a viewer is left to wonder what the poetic breakdown of pure form in art says about culture more generally. By its very nature, Forms and Inflections observes a strong contemporary trend but is too immersed in it to see the broader implications. Time may provide a longer view, but for now, Silverman Gallery has assembled a fantastic set of snapshots.
Forms and Inflections is on view at Silverman Gallery, in San Francisco, through August 20, 2011.
Let’s start with the basics: non-Indian, Urbana, Illinois native Nina Paley’s 2008 animated film Sita Sings the Blues was the alpha and omega of my knowledge of contemporary Indian art. Posing a threat to this ignorance about the art of one-sixth of the world’s population is the San Jose Museum of Art’s Roots in the Air, Branches Below: Modern and Contemporary Art from India. My ignorance, however, served me well there. I was able to approach the exhibition free of preconceived notions of the genre, not even sure of whether a coherent genre existed or not.
To my pleasure, I found that the exhibition offers its audience no such “Indian aesthetic.” This is not to say that one who ignores the wall text and press materials will not know that she is viewing an Indian art exhibit. Many of the works employ recognizably Indian and Hindu symbology, but just as many do not. The gallery devoted to contemporary works displays a dizzying array of bright colors and could just as easily have been an exhibit on Pop Art. A standout piece is Valay Shende’s 2007 untitled sculpture. The statue is of a man who is completely covered in faux-leopard skin and wielding a copper rifle while standing upon a copper lotus-flower pedestal. Though the Indian influences are clear in this setting, in another, I would not be surprised to find the name Jeff Koons attached to it. Potentially representing either an Indian revolutionary or a member of a British hunting expedition, this work reflects India’s torrid colonial history. But the process of revealing this history occurs through an unraveling of the context, not through a reliance on a style that, as with any style, has the potential to over determine the form of the works.
Alexis Kersey’s Lucky, Lucky, Lucky (2008) bears resemblance to a typical ecclesiastical painting of baby Jesus, his mother, and his friend John. The matriarch of this painting, however, wears an Indian sari, and one of the two boys is in fact a girl, who is cutting her own arm with a knife. Save the woman’s dress, there is nothing to suggest that these subjects are Indian, Jewish, or the bizarre Europeanization of Jews common throughout art history. Visually, they exist in Limbo, as is emphasized by a skin condition that afflicts all three bodies and leaves them variously white and tan. It was only upon returning home that I, curious about Kersey’s seemingly un-Hindi name, found that the artist was born and raised and currently lives in India, but is the daughter of Britons. Like Shende’s sculpture, this painting demonstrates the dual British-Hindi nature of the country, but also of the artist.
Valay Shende. Untitled, 2007; fiberglass, frabic, and copper; 66 x 32 x 32 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the collection of Dipti and Rakesh Mathur. Photo: Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai.
Pors and Rao. The Uncle Phone, 2004; plastic, metal, and electrical; 4 x 6 x 78 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the San Jose Museum of Art. Photo: Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.
There are also works that show no obvious sign of engagement with uniquely Indian concerns. In fact, many of the works address universal issues of humanity. Aparna Rao and Soren Pors’ The Uncle Phone (2004) is a six-and-a-half-foot long, fully functioning rotary telephone. With the receiver on one end and the dial on the other, the sculpture-cum-phone illustrates the inherent complication that inhabits all human communication. The information entropy that is apparent in the children’s game telephone does not only arise from multiple interactions. As The Uncle Phone suggests, this data loss is just as much a product of an individual’s own interpretations and dictations. Nonetheless, when taken as a whole, the gallery projects a sense of the politics and history of the nation.
Jehangir Sabavala. Marine Encounter, 1962; oil on canvas; 28 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the San Jose Museum of Art. Photo: Sotheby's, Inc.
The gallery dedicated to modern art after India’s independence shows an equal amount of European influence, but it appears to be more artistic and continental and less overtly political and British. Though colonial subject matter is still present, it is less conspicuous. This is most clear in several of recently deceased Maqbool Fida Husain’s cubist and Picasso-esque paintings. The purple links from a Google search suggest that I once knew about Husain and his work, but still Sita was the only work of “Indian” art I could conjure in my mind. This could be a result of Husain’s refusal to conform to stereotypical notions of an Indian style. The influence of non-European art on Picasso and other modernists is well documented, and so, conversely, non-European artists should be able to articulate the influence Europe has had on them without being called knockoffs or copycats. While Picasso is afforded the opportunity to create works that could simultaneously be Spanish or French or Swiss, why not Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Jehangir Sabavala, or any of the other artists in this room? India has been a nexus of global trade for millennia, and it is colonial thinking to validate European appropriation of non-European culture while failing to appreciate the Indian nature of works that appropriate European culture.
The works in Roots in the Air, Branches Below present a multifarious understanding of the past century of Indian visual culture. It is easy to see one’s own culture in this exhibition, even if it is not Indian. And yet, it is impossible to deny the uniqueness of India. The exhibition is neither an attempt to provide a limiting and stereotypical view of India nor an effort to offer a universal view that erases history. Exhibitions that seek to represent an entire culture or nation are trick entities: they must strike a balance between stereotype and universalism. Roots in the Air, Branches Below is a model for a successful execution of these unfortunately necessary exhibitions. It would be great to view a more specific engagement with Indian art or to appreciate the context of an artist shown outside nationally themed exhibitions, but at times there is a need to create a basic level of public understanding that can augment those ideal scenarios. The San Jose Museum of Art does this admirably.
Roots in the Air, Branches Below: Modern and Contemporary Art from India is on view at the San Jose Museum of Art through September 4, 2011.
As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is republishing John Pyper's article "Martix 162- Shaun Gladwell," on the artist's Matrix exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, which you can also read here.
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An athletic international globe-trotter, Shaun Gladwell’s first solo show in the U.S. is MATRIX 162 at the Wadsworth Atheneum. The exhibition is of five videos (2005 through 2010) and one still image from a video. It ends up reading as a sort of mini-retrospective. It brings together work from his early preoccupation with extreme sports and urban motion through his reflection on the Mad Maxmovies (shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale). His post-Venice works are distinctive, including themes found throughout his career with a new-found subtlety.
Yokohama Linework (2005) is a point-of-view video (here projected on the floor) of a skateboard traveling through Yokohama. The line he traces through the city is like an abstract drawing. It’s a linear composition with no narrative, an urban outline functioning as a self-portrait. He alludes to his own personal interests outside of art in this and other early videos, creating a caricature of the internationally wandering extreme athlete.
Anytime an artist brings in their own hobbies, it seems we then have to call it a form of pop art. Gladwell does directly engage popular movies in his MADDESTMAXIMVS series (2005–2009). After recreating Max’s Interceptor, he filmed two almost identical videos of an black-clad anonymous outlaw surfing on the top of the moving car. These two parts of Surf Sequence, one shot on a clear day and the other in front of a storm, were filmed in slow-motion, elongating the activity and emphasizing the surrounding landscape. This leads the audience to consider both the action and the surrounding Australian landscape.
There is a remarkably different feeling in his Apologies 1-6. Instead of being the outlaw engaged in risky behavior seemingly for fun, the outlaw now is following truckers in the outback of Australia, removing and caressing the resulting
Interceptor Surf Sequence, 2009. Courtesy of the Artist and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT.
Apologies 1-6, 2007-09. Courtesy of the Artist and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT.
roadkill. The kangaroos that he picks up immediately echo Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, but there is an additional layer here in that he is still portraying his Mad Max character. Is there a soft-side, an empathetic and socially liberal message in Mad Max that I don’t remember? The outlaw in Gladwell’s Apologies is an almost mushy, a gently affectionate human who spends time caring for these dead animals that have fallen at man’s mercenary hands.
Gladwell is presumably carving out a space for the extreme sports enthusiast to have these feelings. Instead of just being a reactionary, everlasting man-child, Gladwell inserts an adult concern into this video game character stereotype. It would be impossible to simultaneously be a thinking person and a slave to the X-Games formula of masculinity. Gladwell’s video still of a soldier balancing his gun on his hand allows another inquiry into masculinity. The pigeonholed roughneck is shown in a more casual playful note. Instead of considering the scars left behind by war, in the manner of Sophie Ristelhueber, Gladwell is offering up a quiet moment of humanity that looks foreign as a soldier.
The gun in this film still is similar to the prosthetic devices (skateboard, stilts, and crutches) in a trio of videos culled from his Pataphysical suite. These images of humans using tools to spin returns to his interest in extreme sports, but instead of placing the artist at center, he films hired performers to enact these physical actions.
His most most recent video on display, Pacific Undertow Sequence (Bondi) brings all these themes together. Gladwell sits on a surfboard, but something looks strange about this. What’s going on is that he is upside down, the sun is below him; the light is coming from the bottom to top, he has to lean down to get air, and the waves we see crashing are the undertow of each wave. Gladwell is engaged with an extreme sport again, but instead of being macho and powerful master of improbable motion, he is at the impulses of the tide. Underwater, unable to breath freely, his athleticism keeps him alive. There is another subtle symmetrical landscape with another single actor. Present again is his connection to the outdoors but it doesn’t function on a literal level, have a pedantic message to get across, or refer to a single device. It’s more physical and powerful than conceptual. Trying to sit still on a surf board might be his most vigorous work yet and his most understated.
Chris Johanson’s work makes you feel good, great even, like walking out into sunshine. This, This, This, That, Johanson’s solo show of recent work at Altman Siegel Gallery, expectedly includes some real mood lifters. This selection of brightly colored sculptures and paintings continues in the naïve, raw style that has earned the self-taught Johanson, a former graffiti artist, critical praise and recognition as part of San Francisco’s street-inspired Mission School. Here again, Johanson’s aesthetic is simple, direct, and rough. The sculptures are painted on pieces of wood propped up like stage flats, and the paintings are childlike in their hand-hewn simplicity.
Words also feature in a great many of the pieces, both in their titles and as part of the pieces themselves, demonstrating Johanson’s knack for transmuting language to image. Easy Listening (2011), for instance, is a simple acrylic painting on paper with the words “Easy Listening” surrounded by softly edged shapes in various shades of blue. The painting looks exactly like the way easy listening sounds: float-y, soft, lovely. You can practically hear the elevator music.
The beauty of a painting such as Easy Listening, like much of Johanson’s work, lies in its ability to make the simple poignant. Johanson is like a poet who scraps big words for small ones, making it all look easy while offering up laserlike, well-digested insights. It is Good to Think Good Thoughts for Everyone Not Just You (2011) serves as another prime example of this: a dark blue border becomes increasingly lighter toward the painting’s center, which contains an oval-like space in the middle painted with the phrase “Day Time Comes Again Tomorrow.” These five words touch on the passing of time, which is also referenced visually in the painting’s shifting blues: they evoke the sky transitioning between day and night. Taken together, the text and its ombré background convey a hopeful message: if you’ve thought only of yourself and haven’t considered others, you can always start afresh tomorrow.
Johanson’s art is far from didactic. In fact, it’s funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but the kind of funny that comes out of a well-phrased idea or an original take on something, or something odd that catches you by surprise. Johanson’s
It is Good to Think Good Thoughts for Everyone Not Just You, 2011; acrylic and latex on paper; 14 x 16.25 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.
Now I Know That the Best Place For A Starfish Is In the Ocean, 2011; acrylic and latex on paper; 18 x 23.75 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.
sly humor—whether found in his quirkily painted lines, his fondness for word play, his riotous color palette, or his goofy caricatures of people—elicits small, thoughtful laughs. Now I Know That the Best Place For A Starfish Is In the Ocean (2011) is a nice example. It features one of Johanson’s caricatures of a young man, blue sky overhead, and the title of the work painted small at the bottom of the canvas. The utter incongruity between the words and the image is the key to the painting’s humor.
Johanson’s work also nods to various other well-established genres and artists, perhaps an indication of his interest in having a richer dialogue with the established art world, something one might not expect, given Johanson’s “outsider” status and unfinished style. The allusions aren’t overt, but there’s enough subtle transitioning of styles among the works that it appears he’s testing out art historically recognizable aesthetics. The angular, bold colors of This, This, That, That (from which the show takes its title) and Same Brain, Same Body, Different Day (both 2011) evoke the Neo-Geo movement, whereas a Hans Hofmann-esque breaking down of space into well-defined component parts and colors is evident in Fall Apart and Let It Go, Basic Landscape for Basic Life, and Human Planetary Landscape Within Universal Time (all 2011). There’s even a nod to Post-Impressionist pointillism in the messy landscape Today (2011). All said, it’s also worth considering that Johanson could be playing with us here, goading on viewers to over-intellectualize what, for him, might just be gently poking fun at the academy.
Johanson’s strength is in creating well-crafted juxtapositions of unexpected complexity within something that at first appears to be silly, crude, or simply not painted “well”; that’s what’s so fun to sink into. However, his work runs the risk of falling flat when the apparently simple turns out to be just simple, which happens a couple times in This, This, This, That. For instance, Contemporary Flower Painting #3 (2011)—a large (46.5 x 31.25 inch) acrylic-and-latex-on-wood painting featuring six rows of differently colored rectangles against a mostly green background—is basically a stylized painting of a flower farm. And while artists such as Wayne Thiebaud (who Johanson might be referencing here) can rely on the painting to stand on its own, Johanson’s skills as a painter aren’t always strong enough to guarantee that.
Where Johanson excels is in creating art that makes its humorous point without pushing or shoving. It says what it has to say plainly, from the heart and with a wink, as if to say, “There’s more than meets the eye here. Look again.” When it does that, it’s worth a second look.
This, This, This, That is on view at Altman Siegel Gallery, in San Francisco, through July 30, 2011.
In Heterotopias/MATRIX 238, at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum (BAM), Desirée Holman addresses the fantasy and transformation that occur in virtual games such as Second Life. Through drawings and a three-channel video, Holman creates a complex space in which academic ideas (e.g., the role and extent to which the media facilitates fantasy; the perimeters and relevance of virtual realities; the extent to which and the ways we perform identity; and membership and the significance of subcultures) coexist with the emotional exuberance her characters display as they “get down” while wearing sateen and spandex costumes. Holman creates a collision between Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), live action, and video effects, thereby probing viewers’, artists’, and participants’ willingness to suspend their disbelief.
Holman takes her viewers through the process in which seemingly regular people transform into CGI avatars to establish the duality and overlap of the virtual and the real. Holman transforms live-action characters into abstract wireframe portraits in which we see the geometry, linear contours, motion icons, and rotational points of her subjects. In this second stage of transformation, she applies a diffuse map, where flesh and hair wrap around the polygonal forms. In the final stage of transformation, we see the CGI avatars in their costumes. Holman creates a parallel between the digital and psychological transformations that her subjects undergo, moving from abstract forms through stages of rending and specificity, thus approaching believability.
While heavy with video effects, Holman dedicates most of her video to live-action sequences. Encased in radiant red biomorphic auras, her live-action avatars battle and dance. The red aura surrounding her characters is a residual mark of chroma keying, a video effect that differentiates background from foreground by removing a color range (in this case red). While chroma keying allows Holman to collage her subjects in different contexts, they never seem to be fully believably placed in their scenarios. Rather than being distracting, Holman’s chroma keying acknowledges the way that fantasy is frequently a merging of fact and fiction that tests viewers’ ability to suspend their disbelief. In addition, Holman toggles the backgrounds between landscapes and fantastical scenes but repeatedly returns to the original studio shoot with its blank red backdrop. Through these shifting backgrounds, Holman disrupts the presumed tie between a subject and its environment in lens-based media, making each an independent element with an unlimited number of permutations. Holman’s video suggests an openness to the ways fictions may unfold, which is echoed in the plasticity of virtual gaming.
Video still composite from Heterotopias, 2011; three-channel HD video; 13 mins. Courtesy of the Artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.
Primary Framework 1, 2010; colored pencil and mixed media on paper; 19 x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.
While the television set was the portal to the world in which the fictional Cosby and Barr families “danced off” in Holman’s earlier work The Magic Window (2007), the Internet, as represented through the laptop, connects and facilitates the characters involved in the virtual game in Heterotopias. In contrast to television, the Internet has innumerable nodes through which individuals may access and create fictions, thus creating many places and virtual non-places as sites. In her drawings Primary Framework 1 & 2 (2010), the red screens on the laptops create a parallel with the mutability of image production afforded by chroma keying and the web as a site where subject and context can be inserted and altered to play with narrative.
Holman frequently uses choreographed dance scenes in her videos as the characters become fully immersed in their imaginary worlds. While many of us are hideous dancers, some of us may fantasize about dancing, may dance in our private spaces, or may project a romanticized film over our days at the disco, club, or rave. Holman’s dance sequences resonate with the way that dance may be comic, fabulous, and something that is excluded from our daily lives. From my perspective, Holman creates an uncomfortable dilemma: a viewer is either emotionally drawn to championing the liberated dancing avatars or tempted to take this argument to its new agey but logical conclusion—that bodily movement equals and facilitates freedom. However, within Holman’s narrative, when we see her characters dance, we peer into their private spaces void of self-consciousness. The ridiculousness of their costumes balances out the sincerity of their bodily movements, while the characters express a comfort within their own skin.
Heterotopias continues an investigation of role-playing and subcultures that Holman began with Reborn (2009), which was based on the phenomenon of women who purchase lifelike dolls and nurture them like real babies. While there are taboos associated with both reborn and virtual gaming subcultures, Holman’s work never feels pejorative. Generally speaking, within dominant culture, having an elaborate fantasy life is frequently equated with being socially or emotionally stunted. The elaborateness of the fantasy and the extent to which it affects one’s daily life suggest greater psychological trauma and an actual need for escapism. However, Holman’s work honors the imaginary and brings to bear that all identity is performed. The extent to which our lives and identities are performed may be a matter of parsing the complicated, and possibly conflicting, construction of reality, virtual and narrative. Second Life, while virtual, may in fact be a more honest reality in that all of the members are united in the idea that they are performing an identity.
Holman’s work tests the boundaries between virtual and real for participant and viewer. While the work is clearly the artist’s fictional construct, the banality of the live-action characters at their laptops tinges it with a plausible reality. By contrasting the everyday with the fantastical, Holman poses questions about the role and extent to which we all participate in fictions. Moreover, she interrogates her own practice as an artist and her viewers, whereby a painting, drawing, or lens-based and digital media all share the common allure of constructed narratives.
For a solo exhibition so heavily centered upon the creative interventions of the human hand, Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, feels remarkably bereft. And yet maybe this is the point. Arcangel is a thirty-two-year-old artist whose primary toolbox consists of skills like hacking programing code, plugging away on the keyboard, and clicking a mouse. The software does the heavy lifting here. The artist may be the man in the machine, but the work of the machine is what we see, and that, of course, can be an oddly emotionless interaction.
The much-hyped centerpiece of the exhibition is also its most successful work. Various Self Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ) (2011), a co-commission of the Whitney and London's Barbican Gallery, consists of six very large screens individually aligned with gaming systems of several vintages. From Atari (1977) to Nintendo GameCube (2001), each hacked console plays simulations of bowling games that mysteriously consign players to lobbing nothing but gutter balls. It's both funny and pathetic—bowlers throw up their hands, hang their heads in shame, forever doomed to a score of zilch—but it’s also technically impressive. To make the piece, Arcangel played and recorded each simulation, coding the scenarios into the controllers, and ultimately executing the very act that his piece skewers, which is to say forcing real people to direct fake people to throw fake bowling balls. This is also the entire notion of video games, basically. Various Self Playing Bowling Games exposes not only the essential pathos of gaming, but society's larger coziness with technology. After all, once the machines stop working for us, they're only mechanical, and oddly self-reflexive.
Pro Tools also illuminates Arcangel's signature zeal for cutting and pasting. In Paganini Caprice No. 5 (2011), the artist recreates violinist Niccolo Paginini's nineteenth-century exercise in speed and virtuosity by reassembling the composition note-for-note from YouTube clips of home-schooled heavy metal guitarists likewise exercising speed and virtuosity. Arcangel had to create an entirely new software program just to make editing at that speed possible, and again, his distinct technical wizardry is in full effect. Beyond showcasing his skill, however, the artist’s ambition for the piece is not quite clear. It's funny to see a bunch of longhairs sincerely shredding away, but chopped and decidedly unscrewed as Arcangel renders the music, he also makes his version fairly obnoxious. Each of the clips is loud and lasts only fragments of a second. Under the deluge, I witnessed the docent in the room actually wince.
There's Always One at Every Party (2010) employsa similar predilection for slicing and dicing society's pop-cultural detritus. Remember all those episodes in Seinfeld when
Various Self Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ), 2011 (detail); various modified video game controllers, game consoles, cartridges, disks, and multi-channel video projection; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Team Gallery, New York; Lisson Gallery, London; and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg and Paris.
Hello World #1, 2010; CNC bent stainless steel with electro-polish finish, artist software; 32 x 7.5 x 5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Team Gallery, New York.
Kramer keeps on about his idea to create a coffee table book about coffee tables? Arcangel mines every single episode for those scenes and edits them together. Funny stuff, for sure. But what else?
Pro Tools curator Christiane Paul tries her best to anchor Arcangel's entertaining and whiz-bang work in the larger scheme of art history. But the exhibition's wall text and accompanying curatorial essay seem an overwrought justification of the Whitney’s decision to turn over an entire floor to one of the youngest artist in forty years to be given the privilege.1 Although the show does not make mention of it specifically, I think it's important to note that Arcangel does not come from contemporary art's standard MFA mold; he studied classical guitar and the technology of music at Oberlin Conservatory of Music. A large part of the deserved excitement surrounding his work is due to this unorthodox palette and pedigree. Arcangel, along with similarly circuit-bent souls like those in the Paper Rad collective, grew up playing two-bit video games, making mix tapes dubbed off the radio, watching MTV at it's worst, and going to DIY concerts. There's definitely a history at work here, but it's not the same history that Ivy League–educated art historians supped on conceptualism and continental philosophy would like to believe in. Formalist misfires like Volume Management (2011), a stilted riff on Warhol's Brillo boxes, and Research in Motion (Kinetic Sculpture #6) (2011), a sort of hula-hooping structure that Paul notes as referencing Sol LeWitt’s work, only serve to illustrate this disconnect.
Just as the forms of contemporary art are being knocked over, mashed up, and rendered moot, so are the very barriers of access to art itself. And the life and work of Cory Arcangel is perhaps the most wonderful case in point—a case that the Whitney should be making. While his work can sometimes be a bit cool to the touch, its goofy dynamism can also feel incredibly alive. If Pro Tools feels a bit arid then, the fault lies not with the artist, but with the cobwebs and mothballs of art history's dusty attic. The Whitney is a museum, after all, a place where Joseph Kosuth once noted, “Actual works of art are little more than historical curiosities.”2 To present such a vibrant young artist in the same manner as they would, say, the founding collection—conservative and preservative—is a disservice to both the institution and the exhibiting artist.
Four video installations comprise Architecture of Narrative,the exhibition of work by Belgian artist David Claerbout, currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition’s title underscores the presiding concerns in Claerbout’s study of cinema; he strips his videos of conventions such as plot, character development, and in some cases, action and instead places emphasis on light, sound, and setting. He juxtaposes chronological time against cinematic time, freezing and repeating a single moment so that a scene progresses through a series of vantage points but never forward. In three of the videos, individuals are arrested in position and held captive in a Sisyphean interlude, while space, sound, and time slip past them. More significant than the dissection of cinematic conventions, however, are the negotiations with power that Claerbout creates for viewers.
Claerbout does not forego the assumption that the camera’s gaze translates into a viewer’s gaze. By multiplying the vantage points from which one perceives the scene at hand, or by granting the camera the freedom to move in space unrestricted by obstacles, he alternately bestows a sense of omnipresence or alienation on viewers; though we can see from every angle, we are resolutely outsiders. Sections of a Happy Moment (2007) and The American Room (2009-10) each depict a single moment repeatedly over the course of approximately twenty-five minutes. But while the former grants power to the viewer, the latter seems to rob it.
In The American Room, we see an audience assembled for a recital in a wood-paneled room. The mostly white members are well-coiffed and conservatively dressed in formal attire; Secret Service agents in suits and earpieces guard the door, suggesting that those gathered are individuals in power. The camera moves among, around, and past the room’s occupants, alternately zooming in on one person or panning several, occasionally taking in the whole room at a glance. As the shots compile, we realize that no one has changed position or expression; everyone is inert. Rather than perceiving cinematic time through the movement of individuals, we perceive real time through the accumulation of images.
Claerbout created this video by filming each person individually with a 360-degree blue screen and then carefully stitching them into the recital room of the film. Despite the camera’s unfettered movement and the intimacy it has with its subjects, it is difficult to resist the logic that the camera’s gaze is a proxy for our presence, especially in moments when the camera apprehends the space between the frozen actors, mimicking a wandering gaze. But the longer we linger with The American Room, the more the actors’ unnerving stillness disrupts that logic, and the more alienated and voyeuristic we become.
The same act of viewingbecomes one of surveillance in Sections of a Happy Moment, a single-channel video projection that depicts a Chinese family standing in the plaza of a complex of tall apartment buildings. In a series of black-and-white stills, members of the family surround a young
boy tossing a ball and a young girl with hands futilely outstretched to grasp it. We see this moment over and over from different vantage points. As viewers, we are also surveyors, spying on an elderly couple, scoping out the entire area from an overhead position, and intruding on the conversation of two girls passing by. We swoop in close on one child’s look of pleasure, eyes transfixed on the ball.
In a sense, we taunt these children with our understanding that they’ll never get to complete their game. More important than what is happening is our ability to take in what is happening from any perspective. We derive satisfaction not from their joy, but from our sense of having fully surveyed the event. Despite the obvious pleasures of the scene, our perceived omnipresence, imbued to us from the camera’s perspective, carries the dark undertones of surveillance as a means to secure knowledge, and therefore power. These undertones carry over to Kindergarten Antonio Sant'Elia 1932 (1998), an earlier and far more understated work that also relies on a frozen moment. Here, too, children are arrested in the middle of play; while the leaves of a tree flutter from the wind—the movement connecting the scene to the present moment—the children are fixed as if statues, monuments to a loss of innocence with the pending rise of fascism in Italy.
The same uneasiness with surveillance is amplified in White House, in which a violent struggle between two individuals is resolved by the death of one. The scene repeats with slight variations, but it isn’t looped; Claerbout filmed the thirteen-and-a-half-hour video seventy-three times over the course of a midwinter day. He intended for the scene’s repetition and the absence of any exposition or progression to enervate the impact of the violence, prompting contemplation of the shifting light and the lengthening shadows on the walls of the ruined house instead. But the scene’s sounds continue to disturb on repeat viewings. Each time I watched, I took off the headphones at the moments in which one character brings the rock down to crush the other’s skull. The gurgling sounds emitting from the brutally injured man made it easy to anticipate the sounds of the rock smashing the bones of his covered face without having to listen.
Violent noises rupture the landscape of White House; in The American Room, piano music surrounds the audience similarly to the way in which the camera moves through the room, not front to back or across, but everywhere, all at once. Stillness does not equate to silence in Claerbout’s work; sound is a cinematic convention that he employs as an arbiter in our negotiations with what we experience visually. It stitches together the fissure between cinematic and chronological time that the absence of movement creates, an absence that also distances us as viewers from what we are seeing and makes us more conscious of our role as voyeur or surveyor. Consequently, sound supersedes our sense of control or alienation and restores to us the role of audience. If we cannot be not fully passive as viewers, we are at least receptive as listeners.
San Francisco’s Ratio 3 Gallery commemorates the tenth anniversary of the untimely death of Margaret Kilgallen with Summer/Selections, a show of some fifty of her works. Located on a decidedly ungentrified Mission district alley, the gallery is an appropriate match for Kilgallen’s rough-hewn aesthetic, down to its ancient uneven floor beams and DIY architecture. In the gallery’s front room hang forty-one framed paintings on funky non-archival paper, usually torn from notebooks or sketchbooks, and often yellowed at the edges. Each painting—untitled, like all the works in the show—is resonant with a painful beauty. Think of a finger depressing one piano key to form a perfect isolated and reverberating note. Think of that same finger pushing against the chest above the heart.
Ranging from some two-by-five inches to as much as eleven-by-seventeen inches, the paintings usually depict one image: a plant, a tree, two leaves, a woman, two women, a man. Four are studies: taxonomies of boots, lips, shoes, disembodied women’s hairdos. They’re mannered and immediately identifiable as Kilgallen’s. They are complete thoughts but also serve as documentation of research by the artist’s hand. Images recur as she meditates on their meaning and the variety of ways they can be represented. A few are abstract patterns of dots, or virtually abstract studies of waves and rain. There’s empty ground behind these figures. They’re almost always monochromatic in Kilgallen’s typical strong palette of greens, browns, and reddish-oranges. Her works refer to illustration, typology, and design as sources that are honored while being transcended.
I’ve watched an artist such as Kilgallen’s contemporary, Vincent Fecteau, in the studio; he can debate with himself for weeks on the precise angle of one plane in a small sculpture. For Kilgallen, each painted image is meticulously delivered
Untitled, c. 2000; acrylic on paper; 13.75 x 21 in. Courtesy of the Artist’s estate and Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco.
Untitled, c. 2000; acrylic on paper; 7.25 x 4.75 in. Courtesy of the Artist’s estate and Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco.
with the same scrutiny. A three-inch-tall green summary of a tree bends with yogic grace. A leaf evokes its individuality the way only something alive can. Part of the poignancy of these works is that they are at once comic portraits and profound selected aspects of the world that contain the whole world within their particularity.
Five larger and unframed pieces are on view in the smaller back room. In a couple of these pieces Kilgallen explored quilting together fragments of other works. In one we see tiny slices of undecipherable texts; in another there is a large color field with a small black smudge, which may be a cloud, in one corner. These precious remnants are transitional, still experimental, and ultimately marginal examples of her work. The two highlights of the group include one piece with a small passenger jet and a bike messenger, tying together heavenly and earthbound transportation. The other, the only really dark piece in the exhibition, depicts a lizard dog chomping on a human arm and a gas heater emitting an ominous white cloud. In contrast to those images of worldly peril is a redwood tree regenerating itself, as redwoods do, with feisty sprigs emerging from a trunk cut down before its time.
Summer/Selections is on view at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, through August 5, 2011.
Although empirical study surrounding the nature of light dates at least as far back as the seventeenth century, no single theoretical model encompasses its contradictory behavior. In the field of quantum physics, wave–particle duality postulates that light exhibits both wave-like and particle-like behavior when subjected to different experimental conditions. Even though they may occur alongside one another, both behavioral characteristics cannot be observed simultaneously. This dualism has been both attributed to the limitations inherent in the act of observation, and hypothesized to actually be a fundamental property of all matter. Regardless of which interpretation is correct, the emergence of the paradox not only demonstrates that our conceptual categories often prove insufficient, but it also suggests that our knowledge of what constitutes a world is highly contingent and unstable.
Of course, light has never been a stranger to duality, having long been used as a metaphor for presence, truth, divine and human knowledge, and processes of inclusion and exclusion. Consider Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and its resonance within humanistic notions of enlightened and unenlightened individuals, or the ways in which what is “brought to light” and what is “kept in the shadows” act as powerful regulatory mechanisms within discursive, political, and representational spheres.
ILLUMInations, the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, embraces dualisms such as these and turns them into operative metaphors. Prominently displayed in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, three large-scale paintings by Tintoretto, the sixteenth century Venetian “painter of light,” act as an introduction to the exhibition’s dominant theme, which itself is a kind of chiaroscuro distributed across various levels.1 The Biennale’s curator, Bice Curiger, has opted to overlay the painterly technique—which uses sharp contrasts between light and shadow as a way of modeling—onto the spaces of the Arsenale and the Central Pavilion, literally creating incessant movement from black box to white cube. More than suggesting shadowy zones of uncertainty or the disclosure and emergence of form, this creates a heightened sense of drama, an effect that is bolstered by Curiger’s references to Walter Benjamin and Arthur Rimbaud in the exhibition catalogue, as well as her ambition to “shed light on the institution itself,” by drawing attention to the show’s socio-political dimensions (i.e. the nations referred to in the priceless title).
For example, in the Central Pavilion, Curiger encourages viewers to consider Five Thousand Feet is the Best (2010) by Omer Fast—a video that presents a series of vignettes on topics such as testimony, security, grifting, war, and trauma through various narrative strategies—in connection to the porous notion of borders. Alternately, in the Arsenale, James Turrell’s Ganzfeld APANI (2011),an immersive light installation for which the artist has created the illusion of a wall where there is none, is framed in relation to the Enlightenment teleology of rational human progress. Despite the complex interplay between the two works, reductive appeals such as these—to the dark as obscurantism and lies, and to the light as discovery and truth—are repeated throughout the galleries and quickly grow tiresome. Nevertheless, this belabored approach provides a sense of continuity to a mega exhibition that is soberly installed but generally hectic in its offering of works by eighty-three artists from over fifty countries and several decades.
Within the melee, there are notable highlights, such as Christian Marclay’s Golden Lion-winning work, The Clock (2010), a twenty-four hour film in which time is featured as the main protagonist. Composed of appropriated footage from films spanning the last hundred years, The Clock unfolds in real time, functioning both as a working timepiece and a history of world cinema. Not only is Marclay’s film mesmerizing in its technical accomplishment, it creates startling juxtapositions within a fragmented narrative, such as when excerpts from Spiderman (2002)are intercut with clips from The Sting (1973)and Breathless (1960). Similar to Marclay’s film, contributions from Mariana Castillo Deball, Trisha Donnelly and Ryan Gander each drew me into temporally distinct worlds, subtly holding their own against the scenography without creating a spectacle. Castillo Deball’s drawing and video, El dónde estoy va desapareciendo (The “Where I am” is disappearing) (2011), recounts history from the perspective of a Mesoamerican codex, while outside the Arsenale, Donnelly’s untitled stone sculpture has the gravitas of an ancient monolith. By contrast, Gander’s discreet yet densely titled works, such as Your present time orientation (First Act) – Random abstraction (2011), are scattered throughout the exhibition, hinting at the processes by which shifts such as that from abstraction to appropriation are even possible.
Otherwise, the artist-created para-pavilions offer a welcome reprieve from the exhibition’s general pacing. In particular, Song Dong’s recreation of his family’s ancestral home and Monika Sosnowska’s star-shaped pavilion—which includes
Ryan Gander. Your present time orientation (First Act) – Random abstraction, 2011; installation view, ILLUMInations. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia.
Ahmed Basiony. 30 Days of Running in the Place, 2011; installation view, Egyptian Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Matthew David Rana.
photo essays by South African artist David Goldblatt and a hyperactive sound installation by Haroon Mirza—complicate the Biennale’s central metaphor in a manner similar to that of the national pavilions. Though independently curated, these pavilions productively shift the exhibition’s focus toward what one might call light’s secondary properties: time, speed and intensity.
Conceived as “an extended performance, made of objects, conversations, monologues, theatre, silences, and debate,” Dora García’s exhibition The Inadequate, in the Spanish Pavilion, makes reference to the inadequacy of both artist and nation to represent each other.2 A central stage plays host to an ongoing series of performances and events including, while I was there, a two-day seminar on post-Fordism in art. Flanking the stage are vitrines displaying a wealth of ephemera and research material in connection to the two videos on view: The Deviant Majority (from Basaglia to Brazil) (2010), which charts the history of the anti-psychiatry movement, and The Inadequate: James Joyce, Trieste and Psychoanalysis (2011), which weaves in discussions surrounding the author’s time living in Trieste and his efforts to develop a language for the unconscious with footage of a theater group for individuals who have been diagnosed with mental illness. The cumulative result is a compelling—albeit somewhat familiar—meditation on shifts in our understanding of marginality, both as a historical condition and in relationship to institutional structures.
Dora García. Seminar on post-Fordism in art from The Inadequate, Spanish Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Matthew David Rana.
But if in order to question notions of nationalism, García’s work tends to overvalue the position of the outsider, then Yael Bartana’s work in the Polish Pavilion does the same for the revolutionary hero. The exhibition, …and Europe will be stunned, features her trilogy of impeccably shot films narrating the history of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland—a quasi-fictional organization seeking to repatriate diasporic Jews—alongside that of its iconic leader, SÅ‚awomir Sierakowski, who, when he’s not playing himself in Bartana’s films, happens to be a bona-fide left-wing philosopher, activist, and journalist. But the takeaway stacks of red poster-size manifestos that claim to revivify Zionist phantasmagoria in order to “write a new history” are immediately problematized by the nearby Egyptian Pavilion. On view there is 30 Days of Running in the Place, a memorial to the late artist Ahmed Basiony, who was killed in January during an attack on demonstrators in Tahrir Square. Although undeniably poignant and timely, the installation of screens that randomly alternate between video documentation of the artist’s performances and of uncut footage shot on his digital camera and cellular phone during the protests does justice neither to the artist’s work nor to the complexity and significance of the Arab Spring. Indeed, this so-called “revolution without leaders” is currently on the threshold of co-optation by a dominant narrative, as Mai Abu ElDahab cautions us in Borderless Bastards (multi culti abc) (2011), the audio guide to the pavilions created by Swedish artist Fia Backström, in which she interviewed several art world professionals on the issues of cultural identity and national representation.
Predictably, I left less illuminated than exhausted, having over the course of two-and-a-half days spent nearly twenty-two hours looking at art, with approximately two of those hours vainly seeking out pavilions located in the city’s labyrinthine interior. (Although, I suppose, with any exhibition attempting to overview our contemporaneity, there must out of necessity be some lost time.) While sitting on an outbound vaporetto, gathering my thoughts and reviewing my notes, I looked up and was temporarily blinded by the sun’s reflection on the Grand Canal. As the city slowly came back in to focus, I had a heightened sense of my surroundings: the vibration of the boat’s engine, the scent of the water, the sound of idle conversation in languages that I couldn’t readily identify. Though insignificant when compared to the amount of bodies and resources mobilized in order to mount a major international art exhibition, this fleeting moment nevertheless served as a reminder that the sudden flashes—of the known and the unknown, of past and present, of disorientation and reorientation—that the Biennale sought to create are often unpredictable, rarely planned, and hardly binary.
ILLUMInations, the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale is on view through November 27, 2011.
________ NOTES:
1. The paintings include The Last Supper (on loan from san Giorgio Maggiore Basilica), The Stealing of the Body of St. Mark and The Creation of the Animals (both housed in the Gallerie dell’Accademia).
An examination of identity often starts and ends with questions: How can I measure myself, and what should I use as a yardstick?How should I mark progress, difference, change? Where is the site that the self inhabits? In attempting to answer such questions, Millee Tibbs has created This Is a Picture of Me, an exhibition of photographs that circumnavigate any number of central truths about identity but stop short of revealing its mysteries in full. In order to explore where the self is located and how it is to be understood visually, Tibbs employs multiple approaches. The exhibition is divided into three sections wherein identity is proposed as a relative property, measured against an earlier self, a landscape, or a doppelganger, respectively. Together, the investigations reveal the slippery nature of identity and the perception of identity.
In the first section of the show, Tibbs works from childhood portraits, digitally reinserting her adult self into scenes from her youth. Each piece presents two paired Polaroid-size photographs side by side. The picture on the left shows the artist as a child, and the picture on the right shows a reproduction of the same scene that depicts the artist as an adult. In these re-creations, the adult Tibbs wears the same outfit and attempts to mimic the same face and pose captured in the original photograph. The photo pairs are titled in the manner of family-album snapshots, either by the subject and action of the photo, or simply by a date. The left-hand photo of Millee doesn’t know if it’s winter or summer 1979 (2007) shows a very young bare-chested girl wearing a pair of shorts and a fuzzy winter hat. She looks into the camera unself-consciously, arms dangling by her sides. But on the right, Tibbs’ adult face just can’t quite achieve the same good-natured blankness. Her eyes appear to confront the viewer, to acknowledge the silliness and slight discomfort of her own situation.
The photographs in this section are the most unnerving of the exhibition, not simply because they measure one self against another, younger incarnation; indeed, doing so is a common practice. In a less visual or tangible way, many people hearken back to a previous self as a measure of physical, intellectual, or emotional growth. But by placing herself physically in the scenes and clothing from her childhood, Tibbs uncomfortably squeezes herself into a mold that no longer fits. The advent of Photoshop has allowed the artist to travel back in time to the past; but these pairings demonstrate that our former states of being are not duplicable, no matter how seamlessly they are re-created. Something—an innocence, a kind of
Millee doesn’t know if it’s winter or summer 1979, 2007; pigment print; 3.25 x 4.25 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, Oregon.
Ann/Me, 2010; pigment print, 3.25 x 4.25 in each. Courtesy of the Artist and Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, Oregon.
stainlessness—has been lost, and although the young Millee is quite comfortable with her naked chest, the adult Millee cannot erase the hint of defiance from her face when she stands before the camera exposed, because she knows.
The next section, a group of seven medium-scale pigment prints, questions the truth value of photography as it relates to identity, as well as the reliability of the artist-narrator. Each is a photograph of a landscape captioned underneath with the title of the piece, which claims the presence of the unseen artist. Self-portraitbehind a Rock (2008), for instance, offers a view of a large rock, with no human subject in sight. The captions, delivered in a humorous deadpan, advance the notion that the artist is hidden behind some feature of the landscape. All of the photographs in this series are solid compositions, but after viewing the seven prints, one wonders if the joke leans too hard on the “gotcha” of all one-liners. On the other hand, a slight change to the captions’ wording would have connected the viewer back to the artist and more firmly to the question of identity. Where is the artist? She is behind the camera, of course, and since what we see is what she selected and framed, it is a form of self-portraiture because it reveals something about her taste and motivation.
In the final section of the exhibition, entitled Do You Look Like Me?, Tibbs uses passport-size headshots to question the link between physical appearance and personal identity. These photographs are also arranged in a pairing that invites comparison between the left and right images. The right photo is of Tibbs, while the left photo depicts various strangers who share similar facial features with the artist. Ann/Me (2010) shows two women looking head-on into the camera as though posing for official documentation. While not appearing as identical twins, the two women do seem kindred enough to be mistaken for one another at a glance. In each pairing, Tibbs heightens the visual similarity between herself and the other person by mimicking hairstyles and matching turtlenecks. In these photos, Tibbs measures her own identity against the stranger’s, carving out difference in the face of concurrence. Further, the size and simplicity of the photographs reinforce the feeling of sheer documentation, wherein the images exist as an indexical reference of what makes Tibbs uniquely herself even as she resembles someone else. When viewed individually, the pairings show the coincidence of features between Tibbs and the other subjects; but when taken as a group, the images reinforce the artist’s uniqueness. More than any other section of the exhibition, Do You Look Like Me? exposes the relative nature of identity and the difficulty in locating a permanent and fixed self.
This Is a Picture of Me is on view at Blue Sky Gallery, in Portland, Oregon, through July 3, 2011.
It was a night of hookers telling stories, really—ones about Ecstasy and erections, love and skepticism, rejection and mistaken identities. Philip Huang talked about his grandmother’s vagina, and TT Baum led a trio of naked men pantomiming orgasms on the stage to a soundtrack of sexual anxiety. Cyd Nova, a trans man, talked about getting snubbed by a gender studies academic after peeing on him in a motel bathtub, while black-wigged drag queen Cassandra Gorgeous deconstructed her trademark breathy whisper.
Formerly Known As: Performance by Male and Trans Sex Workers occurred June 9 and 10 at the newly opened Center for Sex and Culture as part of the fourteenth annual National Queer Arts Festival, underway through June. Now in its third year, the event began as a way to highlight the voices of sex workers not normally heard. While female sex workers have gained modest political traction in the past several decades (San Francisco’s Lusty Lady famously unionized in 1997), male and trans sex workers have been less visible.
The June 10 performance, which presented a lineup different from the preceding night, began with organizer Kirk Read’s piece about the thin lines that separate one thing from another, whether it’s a condom between two people or an HIV prevention billboard whose message is protective at first glance, judgmental on the second. “You should try to avoid doing drugs with your clients,” he began, and then fell into a tangle of anecdotes about times when he or his clients didn’t follow his advice.
You shouldn’t do drugs with your clients because, he continued, “you’ll end up fucking him without a condom or getting fucked by him without a condom.” Such dangerous decisions are a perverted sort of liberation, he explained. Condoms are a “bleep,” a censorious skin that feels too much like shame. “And that’s why HIV prevention billboards don’t work for tweakers and fags,” he read. “They become the den of the world they’re trying to escape.” His words were delivered like those from a camp counselor to his younger charges: notes from the field, advice for the next generation. And like a good camp counselor, Read made serious ideas feel like late-night flashlight-lit storytelling.
Two acts diverged from the confessional theme that dominated the night’s six acts. Baum’s cathartic performance piece was a solemn note amid anecdotes, while Huang’s confrontational monologues tested the audience’s tolerance for both his material and him as a performer. The former piece began with four men solemnly walking to the stage like priests approaching the altar. Three wore loose robes; Baum was naked but covered in white latex. On stage, he kneeled while the other performers stood in a half moon behind him and a prerecorded monologue began to play: “Let me tell you about my issues … I can’t seem to have intimate relationships … What’s wrong with my body?” Like a song sung in rounds, each verse was repeated and layered upon the next. It continued: “How do I maintain my erection? I worry I’m not a good lover.” As the loop built in tenor and tension, the three men’s robes fell to the ground. Their naked bodies began to move rhythmically, mouths falling open, amazed but frightened looks in their eyes. One man went to his hands and knees, another gazed into the rafters as though a comet had passed by; the third began to cry, like a seizure had just racked his body.
Their orgasmic highs peaked and fell, and as their bodies stilled, Baum began peeling the latex away. The others joined, freeing him from the suffocating skin. With this exhumation,
Formerly Known As: TT Baum. Courtesy of the Center for Sex and Culture, San Francisco. Video: Mark McBeth.
Formerly Known As: Phillip Huang. Courtesy of the Center for Sex and Culture, San Francisco. Video: Mark McBeth.
the preceding actions gained new significance: the men’s movements, tuned to the repetitive soundtrack, underscored the litany of mental anxiety that can accompany our most physical urges; the material enshrouding Baum functioned as a metaphor for the inhibitions that can curtail our experience of our bodies, conceptually and materially echoing Read’s interpretation of the condom as a confining skin. Although obviously symbolic, the piece’s cryptic and experiential elements kept it from feeling didactic or staged. The night’s most physical (and certainly most naked) piece, it was unexpectedly the most cerebral as well, suggesting that the mind and the body can be in sync after all.
Huang’s dramatic monologues were less successful. Known for presenting transgressive material, the performer began by donning a wig and clip-on earrings. Once transformed into Ellen Foo, hostess of The Ellen Foo Show, he began a faux tutorial on women’s body language. “I’m an average lady with a job,” he said, and “sometimes you have to walk from your job to your car, and you have to be careful about your body language…. What does your body language say to the man hiding in the bushes?” he asked. He sashayed across the stage; this walk says, “Please rape me,” he explained. With an identical gait, he traversed the stage again; this one says, “Don’t rape me.” He repeated the demonstration, the audience becoming more subdued with each pivot.
The piece’s ostensible point was clear: it’s absurd to consider a woman’s body language as either a deterrent to or an instigator of rape. Still, the performance grated on a visceral level, partially due to Huang’s confession that the “transgender progressive community” walked out on him the last time he performed it. “They walked out on me for this!” he distractedly yelled mid-scene. Afterward, he recounted the admonishment he received from an unnamed source following his previous performance: “Rape is not your issue,” he was told. “Rape is never okay to make fun of. Violence against women is not your issue.”
But Huang’s subject matter wasn’t the problem, at least on this night; instead it was the way he deflected responsibility for his material. He seemed to play an elaborate shell game in which the “I” was maddeningly elusive: Was he speaking from his own experience? Was he parodying feminism? Or was he just fighting for the right to say whatever he wanted? If Huang was fighting for his freedom of speech, he didn’t grant his audience the same courtesy. His blatant appeals robbed its members of the right to form their own opinions—to be offended, to be delighted, or to walk out. By describing the reading series and venues from which he’d been banned, his persecution as a performer took center stage; the persecution of women, his supposed subject matter, became an afterthought. Such antics stood in contrast to the other performers, who largely spoke from the implicit position that foregrounding one’s intimate knowledge is paramount.
A set of performances that doesn’t include sex itself performed by people who have sex for work must focus on the act’s non-physical dimensions instead. And they are many. Sex is about the suspension of boundaries: the permeability of self and other, inside and out, even pleasure and pain. Passing through this border zone is like crawling through a barbed-wire fence; to remain unharmed, there must be adjustments, concessions, first-aid kits on hand, and occasional emergency evacuations. There’s so much to talk about, it’s amazing anyone ever gets around to doing it. And so as much as Formerly Known As was about sex, this night was about the thinking and talking that accompanies the physical act. Its strongest moments harnessed the alchemy that occurs when private experience becomes public, when acts of the body become strings of sentences, immaterial ether that can carry all the weight of a physical punch.
Formerly Known As: Performance by Male and Trans Sex Workers was performed at the Center for Sex and Culture, in San Francisco, on June 9 and 10, 2011.
In Frames of War, now on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Hanna Hannah throws a tiny spotlight on what is euphemistically called “collateral damage.” In three galleries and a project room, Hannah presents scroll-like paintings of floral wallpaper hand-painted in casein (a water-based, matte-finish milk paint) with inset vignettes focusing on the aftermath of war, poverty, and natural disasters. Haunted by the images she sees daily in the New York Times, she clips these and files them in drawers. “I have always liked to paint flowers,” she said in a recent gallery talk, “yet I couldn’t forget these scenes of disaster.” Combining the two in a dissonant mix seems like a compelling idea.
The child of German Jews who fled to El Salvador to escape the Nazis, Hannah was born in El Salvador and grew up across the street from families living in shacks. She remembers having the feeling of “Why don’t I live there?” Particularly sensitized to violent disruptions that play havoc with the rhythms of daily life, she has explored this subject for years. Early incarnations of her ideas are presented on a back wall of the gallery: Postcard: Beirut (2006); Postcard: Earthquake in Heyderabad, Iran (2005); and Postcard: Teatime in Afghanistan (2008). In these works, she copied grainy newspaper shots onto scrolls of varying texture and pattern. Postcard:Five Miles from Chernobyl (2009) features a rectangular black-and-white scene of overturned chairs in an empty room. Set against a floral pattern, it is a ghostly TV screen in some Eastern European parlor. In these early works, the artist’s technique is still unpolished and the balance of image and matrix is not quite right. The hand-painted photographic images float on the paper, and the vertical format seems arbitrary.
By 2009, Hannah begins to hit her stride, committing to a robust and high-keyed jungle of rampant Victorian flora as “background” that overwhelms, literally buries, the wartime shot. Her inset images are no longer rectangles, which mimic newspaper and photographic framing, but ovals, more in keeping with Victorian style. Untitled (Iraqi and American soldiers in Ramadi, Iraq) (2009‑2010) features a vignette of sleeping soldiers set into a dense floral pattern. Open-mouthed and snoring but dressed for combat, they have stacked their weapons against a glass-fronted china cabinet.
In the gallery’s two major rooms, Hannah’s ideas are enlarged and aesthetically resolved. For (embedment) (2011), the four walls of the project room are covered from floor to ceiling in a camouflage palette of browns and greens. This “wallpaper” is digitally copied from Hannah’s rendition of a Victorian pattern, repeated and installed as actual wallpaper. Four framed works feature fragments of a photo from the New York Times of Amerli, Iraq, the site of a suicide bomb on July 9, 2007. The small oval paintings of milling survivors and random piles of debris are inset into and framed by a floral wallpaper segment, which is itself set into another painted paper of different design and hue. These pictures-within-pictures, framed and mounted on the camouflage wall, telescope and intensify the act of seeing. But surprisingly, in this era of sharp-focus close-ups, the central image is not sharp. Rendered in casein with small brushes, the central scene is blurred, like a half-remembered dream. The separate segments are like tiles set into a wall.
Wall, 2011; 15 panels, mixed-media on mulberry paper; installation view. Courtesy of the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Photo: rr jones.
Amerli, Iraq, Site of Suicide Bomb I, 2010, detail from (embedment), 2011; mixed-media on paper. Courtesy of the Artist and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Photo: rr jones.
The title of the piece, (embedment), also suggests the journalists and photographers at the scene, “embedded” with the U.S. troops and witnesses to the event. The tiny central focus, overwhelmed by its surroundings, is a mere peephole in the wall—its content muted, its impact constrained, barely tolerable for the artist.
Difficult subject matter often requires indirect expression, and this approach makes it more palatable to artist and viewer alike. Consider Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), a documentary in comic-book style that unravels toxic, repressed memories of a young Israeli soldier during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Or Kara Walker’s wall-size paper silhouettes, which recast the humiliations of slavery with outrageous irreverent humor in a technique practiced by eighteenth-century itinerant artisans. Or Christian Boltanski’s Personnes (2010), for the 2010 Monumenta at Paris’ Grand Palais, which features thousands of pounds of old clothes in gridded heaps on the floor, a material monument to the Holocaust. Or consider the AIDS quilt. Size matters.
With Wall (2011), installed in an adjacent gallery, Hannah has taken a different tack. Using projected images as templates, she has painted on both sides of fifteen scrolls of mulberry paper. On the verso of each, a floral pattern in white curlicues reads as lace. On the face of each scroll, she renders the pixilated image of the Amerli aftermath as a broad band of fluid calligraphic marks. Over and over, she repeats the scene, as if to meditate on it and exorcize it at the same time. Originally intended as a long “wall” of scrolls to be spaced two inches apart, they are mounted here ten inches apart on four walls because of gallery constraints.1 Although the result is handsome, the original intent suffers. The horizontal frieze of gestural marks would have suggested a layer of sediment, the residue left by a high tide—or a wailing wall. The current arrangement diminishes this impact; the verticality of the separate scrolls takes precedence over the horizontal movement of the degraded image. We parse the repetitions, the doubling and mirroring, and try to relate the parts to the series. Each strip becomes decoration, fragile and lacelike, a scroll of inky gestures whose inscriptions cannot be read.
The opportunity to have a major solo exhibition often inspires an artist to take risks and can result in a radical leap in personal and artistic growth. Hanna Hannah has done just that with Frames of War. In this show, she has extended her range and strengthened and clarified the presentation of her ideas. As she continues to play with scale, she may find new ways to both obscure and reveal her vital concerns. In the meantime, her technique has flourished mightily.
In 2005 when the de Young museum opened their new Herzog & de Meuron‑designed facility in Golden Gate Park, the museum endeavored to update their engagement with contemporary art practices. Most visibly, five large-scale works were commissioned from blue chip artists to be featured at the building’s opening celebration, including an immense print by Gerhard Richter, a meditation stupa by James Turrell, a glass installation by Kiki Smith, an outdoor sculpture and crack in the landscaping by Andy Goldsworthy, and a series of paintings by Ed Ruscha. Less sensational but potentially more impactful, the de Young also initiated their Collection Connections program with a series of work by local photographer Catherine Wagner. The program debuted with the objective of integrating contemporary practices with the de Young’s eclectic general collection holdings by asking artists to create a body of work both inspired by and displayed with objects from the de Young’s permanent collection. Marco Breuer: Line of Sight is the latest installment in this program.
Breuer’s studio practice engages the technological apparatus of photographic image-making without participating in the act of photography itself. Rather, Breuer tinkers with photosensitive papers, subjecting them to all kinds of nontraditional physical manipulations prior to chemical processing. To create Untitled (Study for Tremors) (2000), Breuer strafed a heating element from an old frying pan across an unexposed sheet of black-and-white silver gelatin paper. After processing, the transformed chemical elements have merged with the toasted charring of the prints’ base in an abstract image reminiscent of Richter’s squeegee-based paintings. In Spin(C-818)(2008), radial scratches illuminate colors on the surface of chromogenic paper, creating a science fiction wormhole effect. Both his technique and its results demonstrate Breuer’s interest in the obfuscation of image content within an artwork by the methods of its construction and accidents of its history.
Untitled (Study for Tremors), 2000; silver gelatin paper, burned; 18 x 14 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Von Lintel Gallery, New York.
Spin (C-818), 2008; chromogenic paper, exposed, embossed, and abraded; 10.8 x 8.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Von Lintel Gallery, New York.
Breuer’s selections from the de Young’s holdings further illustrate this interest. Initially, the exhibition’s installation reads as something between an intentionally rough apartment show or as evidence of sloppy museum preparatory work. Packaging materials are still on most of the objects, installation directions are still somewhat legible on the gallery walls, mirrors and prints are hung at awkward heights. However, upon closer inspection, Breuer’s method of mirroring his nontraditional photographic studio strategies in the vernacular of a curatorial museum format subsume the institutional detritus on the collection’s artworks. These seemingly incomplete and unfinished installations are key components of the exhibition. A portrait in oils by Samuel Walker, Mrs. Mary Jane White (1843–1914) (1871), hangs with rectangles of tissue paper obscuring the subject’s face and hands. The materials are part of a preservationist’s toolset, as the work is in the process of restoration, albeit temporarily arrested by the exhibition. By including the work in such a liminal state, Breuer appropriates the functional paper forms as an aesthetic formal device, subverting the trope of a traditional portrait. The resulting installation speaks to the accidents of creation, just as Breuer’s photographs do, as a crafted artifact of his intervention.
While this Collection Connection project is successful in advancing Breuer’s artistic reasoning beyond his chosen media of photographic paper, it highlights one of the program’s common pitfalls. The chosen art objects function as props furthering Breuer’s endeavors, but the relationship is not mutual. Little understanding or knowledge is produced about the objects from the collection beyond their display—an unfortunate missed opportunity for the artist, institution, and the museum audience.
Marco Breuer: Line of Sight is on view at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, though October 2, 2011.
Quiet and complex reflections on fear, anxiety, and survival permeate Zombie-Proof House, the current group exhibition at di Rosa in which eleven artists search for and sort through the abundant and very real environmental, political, and social issues facing contemporary communities and individuals. The show’s theme is not zombies, per se, but the cultural landscape that allows for the pervasive production and ravenous consumption of end-of-the-world scenarios, as well as the immense enterprise fueled and funded by a population of consumers fascinated with fear, the human condition, and, ultimately, survival.
On May 16, 2011, the Public Health Matters Blog of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) posted an article titled “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.” The post suggests items the average person ought to have prepared in the event of an impending and perhaps inevitable zombie takeover. Though not a comprehensive list by any means, it highlights staple necessities such as a first-aid kit, water and food, bedding, and important personal documents. The CDC admits to using this tongue-in-cheek metaphor to, in fact, prepare society for other more immediate natural disasters, like the looming hurricane season and impending earthquakes; it states that it’s better to be “safe than sorry.” As the post suggests, if one were to prepare for this satirical, yet entirely possible, worst-case zombie scenario, it’s also easy to be prepared to wait out a few downed power lines from any old hurricane or earthquake. The phrase “better safe than sorry” is one of those brand-like figures of speech fundamentally rooted in anxiety, fear, and paranoia, which in many ways works to distract from the tougher questions that plague the current cultural tumult, and di Rosa's Zombie-Proof House is an elegant example of artists who are picking up on these cultural red herrings.
Though the gallery building at di Rosa is surrounded by an arresting natural landscape—quite the backdrop for visiting one of the largest collections of California art in the country—these rolling hills of Napa are “yet another post-apocalyptic scenario.” At least according to Anthony Discenza’s satirically predictive construction sign that is installed outside, deliberately cutting through the picture-postcard di Rosa landscape. Discenza's work is hard to miss, yet it is also easy not to see. This type of common industrial signage cluttering urban landscapes can be so ubiquitous that it is often ignored—a type of blindness that is just one of the poignant themes in Discenza's work.
Inside, a roll of Packard Jennings' gold Bible Stickers (2005) hang discreetly on a gallery wall, inciting visitors to question the torrid and complicated relationship that the United States has with religion. Jennings calls for a criticality of how texts such as the Bible are used and read. The mere practice of
Anthony Discenza. Another Post-Apocalyptic Scenario, 2011; vinyl on aluminum. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.
Whitney Lynn. Bunker/Bunker, 2010; archival inkjet print mounted on aluminum. Courtesy of the Artist.
placing a Bible in contemporary hotel rooms addresses not-so-subtle contradictions of terms such as “freedom of religion.” But Jennings asks viewers to go one step further, inviting them to take one of his Bible stickers with them and place it into the Bibles they may come across in their travels.
Discenza’s and Jennings’ work exposes and creates slippages in both the representation of and response to a smorgasbord of global and local anxiety by calling out the proverbial hype. Many of the artists in the show dig into and, at times, take digs at how quickly fantastical aspects of death, faith, or even the environment (read: sad polar bear stranded on an icecap) serve as distractions rather than an incitation to action and accountability; such a response is much easier than examining the current raptness with “being aware” or simply creating a dialogue. Instead these artists ask: what do we actually do?
Many of the works in Zombie-Proof House reflect on notions of survival in a post-[fill in the blank] world in different degrees of literalness. Multimedia artist Whitney Lynn juxtaposes spatial subjects that have the same name but very different meanings. In her photograph Bunker/Bunker (2010), what is left of a dilapidated stone bunker sags into the side of an incline, both of which risk crumbling into a golf bunker sitting directly in front. The rough here looks especially overgrown, but not so much so as to mirror the age of the architectural bunker. What near future is this? And, more importantly, how will the ongoing shift in delineation of space simultaneously shift how we navigate these spaces and one another amidst the economic, political, and environmental changes that are undoubtedly already in motion? On the floor and walls of the right section of the gallery, Lucy Puls' sculptures appropriate the leftovers from such postindustrial consumer spaces as foreclosed homes. Puls pairs photographs of transitional domestic spaces, such as a stairwell, with found objects such as a light fixture or an old television; a haunting sense of anxiety seeps through Puls' representations of the residue of what is still an ongoing national financial crisis. Zombie-Proof House contends with these bigger questions about what will happen when the world we live in changes: when the gadgets, objects, and spaces that currently structure our lives change, if not fail, what will we do with them, ourselves, and each other?
The ice caps are melting. New contending epidemic diseases spring up monthly. Markets are crashing. The landfills are rising. In the current, post-9/11, color-coded-terror-threat-level, hand-sanitizing space of sociopolitical cultural fear, it's no wonder that artists are producing works that examine what is produced in spaces of grave anxiety; it’s where we live. But the artists in Zombie-Proof House are not offering didactic scoldings, preventative diatribes, or even ominous predictions about the state of the world; instead, they are asking viewers to really stop and consider the world they live in. And perhaps they’re also suggesting a creative and critical model to address the unavoidable changes that are surely looming.
Zombie-Proof House is on view at di Rosa, in Napa, California, through September 17, 2011.
As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is republishing Heather van Winckles'article "Constructing the Victim," on Cady Noland and Santiago Sierra's exhibition at KOW Berlin, which you can also read here at Daily Serving.
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Like a newspaper in its matter-of-fact presentation of content, Cady Noland / Santiago Sierra at KOW Berlin, curated by Alexander Koch and Nikolaus Oberhuber, appears purposefully removed of emotion. We never make eye contact with other humans, backs are often turned, or we find ourselves averting our eyes for our own protection. We stand on the outside looking in. No one makes a human gesture towards us as viewers; our presence is not acknowledged or regarded with any sort of value. Just as we may be blind to others' suffering, we are made invisible and unimportant.
Sierra’s video, Burned Buildings (Found Scene) (2008),starts with a hectic, first-person shot approaching a fire. We hear sirens, and see the unsteadiness of the handheld camcorder. We arrive behind a wall—shielding our view of the actual building—the camera is set down, and the video transforms into a contemplative, moving grisaille of smoke in the wind. Any standard journalistic questions linger and remain unanswered.
Monochromatic in its curation, the visual aesthetic of the show easily captivates. This is a purposeful distraction. If we just look at the pictures without bothering to read the story, we don’t need to concern ourselves with the reality of the situations presented. Considering how many images and texts present themselves to us each day, disregarding most of them may be the best coping mechanism for fulfilling our day-to-day tasks and pursuing our own lives.
It is difficult, however, not to be struck by two of Sierra’s photographs, Teeth of the Last Gipsies of Ponticelli (2008). Two open mouths of teeth, ground down and deformed, give evidence of the psychological stress and physical condition of the sitters. They are both captivating and devastating in their spectacle. The time-intensive process of wearing teeth down so severely brings more questions than emotional concern. Awareness of this state implicates the viewer as partial perpetrator, despite the victim being foreign and obtuse.
Violence is an ever-present undercurrent of the show, and is most overt in Noland’s piece, Enquirer with Eyes Cut Out (1990). The removal of the image’s eyes points to a sort of Hollywood version of psychopathy. The type of story presented, involving the private lives of celebrities, exists in
Santiago Sierra. Audience Lit by a Petrol Operated Generator, 2008 and Veteran Standing in the Corner, 2011; installation view, KOW Berlin. Courtesy of KOW Berlin.
Cady Noland, Metal Fence, 1990, and Santiago Sierra,89 Huichols, 2006; installation view, KOW Berline. Courtesy of KOW Berlin, Sammlung Gaby, and Wilhelm Shuermann. Photo: Alexander Koch.
our culture not for its importance or affect on society at large, but rather to knock down people above us in the social hierarchy. Celebrity ‘rag mags’ seem to exist solely for this eventual purpose. Removing the eyes dehumanizes, and by taking away a celebrity’s humanity, we are able to freely violate and judge them, therefore purposefully making ourselves the offenders to their victimhood.
We’ve all heard stories of exploitation, just as we’ve all at times chosen not to act or to rebel against various human atrocities. Seeing documentation of this, be it in a paper or on a gallery’s walls, allows us distance and freedom from any sense of responsibility. The content of the show, however, remains commonplace. It’s delivered to us daily in our mailboxes, or is readily available at the corner newsstand. In 89 Huichols (2006), Sierra highlights particular examples from our world that act as stand-ins for the marginalized figures that give regular society its “other” of the moment. Coupled with Noland’s work, the curators have moved us from the Sierra conversation “Why would he do that?” to “Why do we allow this?” The stories Sierra covers here don’t get a lot of news time when contrasted against Jaclyn Smith’s divorce, due to a lack of interest from the general public. This sentiment is subtle, but apparent throughout the exhibition.
There is a detached quality between both Noland and Sierra and their work. They’re no Sarah McLachlan, who appeals to our emotions to garner donations for abused animals. Instead, Coland and Sierra offer fodder for intellectual study. They have selected specific victims for examination, but instead of inciting activism, the non-sensationalism of the exhibition is at times apathetic, and thus calls us out for our own apathy toward the details of the content. The power of this show relies on having a calm and ordered appearance, as well as projecting a tone of rationalism.
While a sort of historicizing happens with the pieces that involve particular groups of people, the object-based pieces in the show exist with a sort of timelessness. These pieces treat the viewer as both victim and perpetrator. We cause our own unease by walking through an imposing gate, and yet we subject ourselves to the onslaught of bright buzzing lights with the visceral awareness that even though we’re in control, we’re contributing to our own discomfort.
We know the wince and moment of anticipation all too well, but we continue to rubberneck at the sight of a car crash. For all the controversy that Noland and Sierra are known for, the show’s sense of violence or exploitation is severely reserved when pitted against any real story of human suffering. Noland and Sierra’s approaches to victimization in our society complicate our individual roles and responsibilities in playing on either side. While no one wants to be a victim, we seem to find ourselves in a position where victimization is natural or necessary, so we prefer the alternative, perhaps despite the moral implications of it, in order to survive.
Cady Noland / Santiago Sierra is on view at KOW Berlin through July 29, 2011.
To survive means to continue to exist despite encroaching death, danger, or hardship. Online search results reveal its colloquial meaning to be more elastic, even dipping into fantasy; the most trafficked inquiries include surviving a long fall, a plane crash, high school, jail, total economic collapse, the apocalypse, and a zombie attack. How to Survive, a weekend-long workshop organized by Los Angeles–based artists Alyse Emdur and Michael Parker for High Desert Test Sites’ (HDTS) “New Everyday Life” lecture and workshop series, dealt irreverently with the model of ameliorative self-help, while pointing out fluctuating and culturally relative notions of necessity and survival. Demonstrations offered instruction in activities ranging from the informative to the absurd and touched on a variety of human needs, including food, communication, exercise, leisure, and energy.1 Each activity, whether it was building a solar oven or distilling moonshine, was informed by cognizance of both the fables that shape and the regulations that codify it.
The Mojave Desert is a fitting place to think through questions of necessity. Its location a few hours from Los Angeles has turned it into a popular escape, but signs of gritty homesteader history are still visible on the plot adjacent to A-Z West, Andrea Zittel’s Joshua Tree studio where HDTS is based. From 1863 to 1977, individuals were encouraged to stake claims on 160-acre parcels, provided they “proved up” by building cabins or outhouses; many of these markers are still tucked in the boulders, abandoned for a more hospitable landscape or economic climate.2
According to the National Park Service and elementary-school textbooks, homesteaders were paragons of ingenuity who thrived by using what they had. The first workshop session, a tutorial on building solar ovens led by Emdur and Parker, tapped into that storied aspiration, though all the necessary materials were already on hand. Emdur introduced the activity as one increasingly undertaken out of necessity; where resources are scarce or difficult to access, solar ovens provide a means of pasteurizing food and purifying water. Where they are not needed, however, they are icons of grade-school science fairs, of a time when experimentation is mandated and reassuringly codified: hypothesize, control, test, and conclude. Guided by a zine entitled How toBuild a California Dreamin’ Solar Oven, participants used simple materials such as cardboard boxes, glue, aluminum foil, and papier-mâché. The discrepancy between the oven’s exigent use and its nostalgia-laden symbolic meaning introduced a fissure between urgency, usefulness, and recreation in which each subsequent action could be considered.
For the second workshop session, Flora Wiegmann used military training manuals and wildlife safety instructions as source materials for teaching survival choreography. She guided participants through movements that enable soldiers to communicate directions from a distance and gestures that allow hikers and swimmers to escape animal confrontations. After learning the motions, pairs of participants used them to
Alyse Emdur and Michael Parker. How to Survive, 2011; workshop. Courtesy of the Artists.
Flora Wiegmann teaching the gesture for “move forward” as part of her session on safety and survival movements. Alyse Emdur and Michael Parker. How to Survive, 2011; workshop. Courtesy of the Artists.
direct each other down a dirt road and into a dry creek. One directive, indicated to distant partners by pummeling the air with one fist, instructed them to jab at invisible shark gills or curl up on the sand. Transplanted into a near-danger-free context, signals intended to facilitate survival became forms for interaction that required surrendering self-consciousness. The activity felt like playing pretend, a game defined by the excitement and hazard of rules made up on the spot. It was also reminiscent of team charades, trust-falls or other exercises from corporate retreats that are mandated with an eye toward increased productivity.
Afterward, home brewers Aaron Freeman and Tyler Nathan sat outside over a claw-foot bathtub and demonstrated the distillation of white lightning, a type of moonshine developed in response to Prohibition legislation. Persisting quality regulations are residuals of this history, intended to protect the public from moonshine-induced death and blindness.3 Though Freeman and Nathan produce more than enough for their own needs, they don’t sell their sprits, limited by the cost of commercial licensing. Not bound to produce a consistent product, their process remains experimental, but within limits. This session presented survival as the protection of one’s own interests in defiance of regulation, but also suggested that regulations have the equivocal potential to take the place of self-protection. The rules conditioning notions of survival change over time and through conflict, as needs are systematized in culture and in legislation.
After a solar oatmeal breakfast the next morning, participants traveled the hairpin turns above Pioneertown to tour the off-the-grid property of Aaron and Ronda Mueller. Their two conjoined yurts, hand-built with pool vinyl stretched over floating ceilings, are outfitted with a composting toilet, a bucket with sawdust and a scoop. Solar panels power laptops, a flat-screen, and a standard refrigerator. Their inventive use of resources, a sort of contemporary equivalent of “proving up,” is frequently met with resistance from code-enforcing officials. The Muellers make corrections to meet code one at a time, so they always have progress to show in the event of an encounter.
Means of defining necessity range in scale and seriousness from grade-school guidelines outlining the scientific method to military safety procedures, from land-use laws to rules that regulate leisure. By breaking actions from the contexts that make them perceptible as necessary, How to Survive played with these rules, making them visible as constructions, as malleable as they would be in a game of pretend. This opens them up for questioning and rethinking, but does not suggest that they are always so plastic.
How to Survive did not propose the existence of a rule-free space (even the game of pretend is a gauntlet of rules and volatile power structures), but one in which the motivations and conditions of existing guidelines are susceptible to reevaluation. Because the codification of a process is often meant to exert control over a product, as in science classrooms, self-help books, and liquor licensing alike, How to Survive looked on increased production with resistance. Solar ovens were taken home unfinished; the project generated only as much food and energy as it could use. It enacted a kind of self-regulation, out of necessity.
How to Survive took place at High Desert Test Sites, in Joshua Tree, California, from April 30 to May 1, 2011.
________ NOTES:
1. Emdur has investigated the genre before in her collection of self-help literature entitled How-to Write How-to and Self-Help Books (2010).
3. Freeman and Nathan informed participants that these effects were actually caused by toxic additives sometimes used by bootleggers to make moonshine seem stronger.
Judith Foosaner's paintings in the lobby of One Post Street are stark explorations of movement, line, and surface. Limiting her palette to black and white, she fully focuses on formal properties in Moving Violations. Foosaner begins with expressive line drawings in charcoal on paper, adding black acrylic paint. She then cuts these up into rectangles and reassembles them as collages on canvas. The resulting works capture a tension between gesture and geometry, hand and grid.
Though Foosaner’s works lack a central focal point, they are by no means static; swirling light and dark forms dance across the surface of the canvases, interrupted by thin, pasted rectangles. She establishes a dynamic between the ground of the canvas and overlaying forms, flipping back and forth between white and black, a duality that is mirrored in the literal surface tension between the canvas and the collaged elements on top: painted and pasted. The titles of her works—Moving Violations (2010–2011), Breaking and Entering (2011), State of Siege (2011)—playfully allude to these competing dualities.
The Moving Violations series shows a formal connection to Abstract Expressionism, bringing to mind the organic fluidity of Arshile Gorky, the all-over painting of Lee Krasner, or the gridded black constructions of Louise Nevelson. However, her work also intermingles the influence of the post–Abstract Expressionist painters who favored system and logic over unbridled gesture. The power of Moving Violations lies in the way Foosaner deftly mediates between these touchstones, balancing the energetic movement of her painted forms with the cut and overlaid structure; the hand-painted improvisations dance around the rigid cadences established by the hard-edged collage. Indeed, these works have a musicality to them, and their loosely gridded arrangement
Moving Violations #2, 2010; collage with acrylic on canvas; 42 x 78 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco.
State of Siege, 2011; collage with acrylic on canvas; 66 x 66 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco.
shares some similarity with music staves, as if capturing both the structure and guided fluidity of musical notation.
As much as they recall organized musical or written data, the works of Moving Violations are also reminiscent of the aesthetics and inevitable degeneration of digital data. Although she uses traditional painting materials, our perception of her work shares something with our experience of popular contemporary technology. There are visual parallels between the linear disruptions in these surfaces and the pixelation of online video. The inherent confusion and inability to fully “read” these paintings speaks to the current age of information fatigue, physically manifesting the way in which exponentially increasing access to information and data has become inversely proportional to our level of knowledge and understanding.
With her misleadingly facile Moving Violations series, Foosaner draws on the history of abstraction to create engrossing formal investigations. Looking to Abstract Expressionism and the artists that succeeded that movement, she combines gestural painting with collage, balancing organic lyricism with geometric order. The technique of adding collaged elements on top of the canvas not only challenges the primacy of the picture plane, but thwarts attempts to dismiss these paintings as simply part of the high modernist project. As much as these works are about literal surface tension, they are also about the disorientation of encountering a language just beyond our comprehension.
Santa Monica–based artist Michael C. McMillen’s evocative retrospective is currently on view at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA). The title comes from his kinetic sculpture Train of Thought (1990), in which a small wooden trestle with a motorized track emerges from a museum wall and stops abruptly over the viewer’s head. The track gently conveys five hundred pounds of tiny alphabet noodles that fall letter by letter into an accumulating pile of macaroni. The seventy pieces that constitute Train of Thought are overwhelmingly good humored, beautifully crafted, unsettling, and philosophical, gently poking fun at the vulnerability and absurdity of human existence.
In this exhibition, McMillen uses the museum itself as site. His paintings, drawings, assemblages, sculptures, and installations are placed throughout the museum as interventions that dialogue with OMCA’s freshly reinstalled collection of California art. Walking through the exhibition, one towers over small-scale boats, airplanes, and hotels taken from the vernacular of mid-century American landscape, literature, and films. His piece Raft of History (1984) is a shipwreck placed directly across from a William T. Wiley installation called How to Chart a Course (1971), which looks like a three-dimensional treasure map.
I was familiar with McMillen’s Aristotle’s Cage (1983), which is on permanent view in the museum. Entering through a torn screen door into a darkened space, the viewer encounters a miniature diorama in which a decrepit trailer is set against an orange sky in a desolate desert landscape dotted with oil drums, American cars, and other refuse of modern American life. The lights are on in the trailer and in the factory in the distance. This piece uses the allegory of Plato’s Cave and examines the line between appearance and reality. McMillen strategically combines found objects with his own fabrications, examining the mysterious afterlife of objects and how they connect with poetry, the paranormal, dreams, popular culture, and science fiction.
The 1950s and ’60s Los Angeles of McMillen’s youth was crisscrossed by freeways, anchored by the aerospace industry, spooked by post-war nightmares, and colored by the tacky Southern California beach culture of Venice Beach and the Pacific Ocean Park. Raised by his grandparents in Santa Monica, McMillen was influenced by the Hollywood dream factory and its working class artisans, including his dad, a scene designer for TV, and his next-door neighbor Kenneth Strickfaden, who designed the electrical effects and
Red Trailer Motel, 2003; mixed media; installation view, Oakland Museum of California. Courtesy of the Artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.
Lighthouse (Hotel New Empire), 2010; mixed media installation with artist-made digital motion picture. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.
machines for the first Frankenstein movie in 1931. McMillen himself also worked as a prop designer in Hollywood.
McMillen’s 1973 graduate show at UCLA was a storefront installation in Venice called The Traveling Mystery Museum. The piece was staged at a local shopping mall, and shoppers encountered an ancient mummy (fabricated by McMillen) displayed in a glass case, predating the better known Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. A number of pieces from The Traveling Mystery Museum are included in the current OMCA show, including Spy Fly (1973), a diagrammatic drawing of a video drone disguised as a fly, the fabricated mummy head, the floor plans of The Traveling Mystery Museum, and the bottled last words of Picasso, certified by one Dr. P. Bernal. Although he was a generation younger, McMillen was influenced by Los Angeles’ visual Beats, a group that included collage and assemblage artists Edward Kienholz and George Herms.
Pavilion of Rain (1987), Lighthouse (Hotel New Empire) (2010), and Red Trailer Motel (2003) are large-scale installations in three self-contained rooms at the rear of the exhibition and are reminiscent of McMillen’s earlier installation Central Meridian (aka the Garage) (1981). The Garage was an homage to his grandfather and neighbor, Strickfaden, taking the form of a life-size garage installed in The Museum as Site: Sixteen Projects (1981)at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Pavilion of Rain is a corrugated metal shack with a rain shower timed for every twenty minutes. The ramshackle structure is placed in a thirty-six-foot-long pool of water. It is fitted with survival gear including a surfboard, baby buggy, and a real diving suit with a pair of lead shoes gifted to him by longtime friend and curator Philip Linhares. Red Trailer Motel is an L-shaped façade with four doors. The first door has the rules of the motel posted next to a locked door. The other three doors have peepholes with which one can view magnified miniature rooms with mysterious goings-on. Directly across the room is a kinetic monochromatic red wall with an installation called Time Below (2004),which features an aerial view of Red TrailerMotel. Lighthouse (Hotel New Empire) is a scale model of a hotel precariously supported by posts in a vat of swirling water with a filmy sheen. The hotel has a billboard that also doubles as a projection screen showing his recent film Quotidian Man (2009).
McMillen’s pieces alternate between the forgotten motel at the end of the road, hosted by Norman Bates, and a rustic temple where one can make an offering. His work is concerned with the contemplation of time: whether he uses an underlying nostalgic film noir–fueled anxiety, a futurist Blade Runner nightmare, or the counting of beans, as in his piece Deliverance (1993). McMillen makes poetic signs and markers, and even places of refuge along the way, but we will never know where we are going, how long it will take, and what we will find.
In conjunction with this review, the author conducted an interview with Michael C. McMillen on April 29, 2011, and an interview with Philip Linhares on June 3, 2011.
What if we thought of the substance of art not as media, but as matter? Matter exists continuously, whereas media must be elevated to the status of an art object. In turn, by making art, artists are performing manipulations, not transformations. The process shifts from an alchemical to a quotidian one.
The works in Under Destruction I and II inspired that thought experiment by presenting creation and destruction as interdependent—and sometimes as the same. The well-curated exhibition features cerebral, oft-kinetic sculptures, installations, and media projects dating from the past twenty-three years. It’s a welcome introduction to contemporary European, American, and Latin American artists and their open-ended works that provides little resolution and much room for interpretation.
A group exhibition originating at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Under Destruction appears in New York in three consecutive and heterogeneous chapters, all at the Swiss Institute. Under Destruction I was a quiet, poetic prelude featuring understated sculptural works made with commonplace objects. Nina Canell’s Perpetuum Mobile (40kg) (2009–2010) is an elegant example. A bowl of water sits on the ground next to a paper sack of cement. Activated by sonic vibrations, the water is frothed to a fantastical mist, which solidifies the adjacent building material imperceptibly.
Seductive illusion has little pull in this show—forms result from materials and processes. Nina Beier and Marie Lund’s History Makes a Young Man Old (2011) is a crystal ball that was rolled to the gallery from its place of purchase in a site-specific performance. The marks of experience obscure the clarity for which the material is valued; it’s not much to look at, and that is the point. In Monica Bonvincini’s White (2003), a cube of cracked safety glass houses an armature of neon tubes, interchanging structure and surface. Pavel Büchler’s Modern Paintings (1999–2000) is a series of abstract paintings collaged from found paintings that have been cut up and put through a washer.
Two single-camera media works hint at the active destruction in the next chapter. Micheal Sailstorfer’s Untitled (Bulb) (2010) shows a light bulb fracturing on impact. Originally shot in high-speed HD video and then transferred to 16mm film, it literalizes the high compliment that digital images can achieve film quality. Alex Hubbard’s Cinépolis (2007) adopts an action painting–like procedure for video, in which a projection screen is destroyed in service as a canvas for blowtorched Mylar balloons, tar, and feathers.
Everything the first isn’t, the second chapter is: noisy, spectacular, and physically stressful. Under Destruction II is a dissonant factory of counter-production. The influence of Jean Tinguely’s kinetic machines is acute. Visitors control the speed of a wrecking ball that demolishes the gallery walls in
Nina Canell. Perpetuum Mobile (40kg), 2009-2010; water bucket, steel, hydrophone, mist-machine, amplifier, cable and 40 kg cement; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin/Düsseldorf.
Liz Larner. Corner Basher, 1988; steel, stainless steel and electric motor with speed control mechanism, 10 feet high. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin.
Liz Larner’s Corner Basher (1988). Whacking the sheetrock at low speeds is pleasantly subversive. But at the highest setting, it whips around with the frightening velocity of a trebuchet, and the centrifugal force threatens to topple the machine. I felt a palpable breech of safety; Larner had created a scenario that cast my limits in high relief.
Heavy machinery is also employed in Arcangelo Sassolino’s untitled oversize hydraulic squeezing machine (2007). Only operated on weekdays, it lay passively during my visit. Nonetheless I discerned its force; a log was splitting under the immense pressure in its braided steel cable maw. Nearby, Roman Signer’s Stuhl (2001) is a video of a water mill–powered rotor, which made short work of dragging and demolishing a chair into splinters. The documentary-style shots were coolly indifferent, like the unflinching destruction.
Such mechanical efficacy contrasts with three works flirting with purposelessness. Johannes Vogl’s ludicrous Untitled (Machine to Produce Jam Breads) (2007) is industrial in size, makeshift in assembly; a bicycle sprocket set and PET bottle are deployed. Slices of cheap white bread ride a jam-smeared conveyor belt before dropping onto a mountain of similarly sluiced wheat foam on the floor. Recalling Tinguely’s self-destruction machine in concept, Ariel Orozco’s Doble Desgaste (2005) is a series of photographs documenting the futile attempts to sketch a cubic eraser. The eraser diminishes as the drawing proceeds, until neither eraser nor sketch remain. It’s an endgame; the finitude is satisfying. Jimmie Durham’s St. Frigo (1997) is a two-channel video installation of the stoning of a refrigerator. Men (of course) are shown lobbing bricks at the appliance, setting off clangs that echo throughout the gallery. Some rackets are out of sync, underscoring the off-pitch senselessness of the performance. Of all modern conveniences, fridges seem like an unwarranted target.
Pink Constellation (2001), Marin Kersel’s fascinating video, has the show’s only fictional narrative. Set in a cotton candy–colored bedroom that rotates in parallel with the camera, a teenage girl dreamily traverses the walls and ceiling. The special effects give way to a nightmarish scene where the artist is chased around the room by its entropic furnishings. The topsy-turvy world is mythical, yet it seems uncomfortably close following the recent tornadoes in the Midwest.
Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag (2000) amplifies the show’s chaos and din to even higher audio and psychological levels. Shot in San Antonio, Texas, in 1999, the movie features Marclay dragging a red Fender guitar behind a flatbed Chevy pick-up, sending an unarticulated droning signal at a concert-like volume. Marclay made no direct references to the 1999 lynching-by-dragging of James Byrd by white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, yet the indelible memory of the murder details spurred the connection, and consequently, a sense of horror and outrage.
Under Destruction threads an unlikely connection between the reticence of works like History Makes a Young Man Old and the violence of Guitar Drag and Corner Basher. Like the crystal ball rolled down a street, the show impresses physical traces, tapping embodied cognition or punching to the gut. Enduring the cacophony, visitors become aware of their own constitution—our skin and bones as the matter we operate.
Under Destruction II is on view at the Swiss Institute, in New York, through June 19, 2011. Under Destruction III is scheduled for June 29 to August 7, 2011, and Under Destruction I was on view from April 6 to May 8, 2011.
It is not often that one finds monographic exhibitions at the Walter and McBean Galleries at the San Francisco Art Institute, so when it happens, it is worth paying attention. Curator Hou Hanru has a reputation for staging thematic exhibitions at the gallery and for bringing some of the most compelling and timely contemporary art to the Bay Area. His decision to give a solo show to the artist Shahzia Sikander is a testament to the complexity and force of her work. Sikander is known for her richly layered and intricately detailed paintings, which often engage with the traditions of Mughal or Persian miniature painting, but this exhibition includes primarily animation and video works, and may come as something of a surprise. To be sure, drawings are included; one fantastic large-scale piece, Confrontation (2011), greets the visitor upon entering the gallery, and a handful of other works on paper are grouped in two other locations. But the force behind this exhibition is the animation, elaborated in multiple projects realized between 2003 and 2010, all of which explode the pictorial elements of her drawings into real time.
Though the death of painting has been repeatedly proclaimed, the practice continues due to the fundamental strength of its model of viewing and cognition. Looking at paintings is a phenomenological sort of exercise that forces viewers to engage the works’ visual signs as they exist in space and in history, connecting what they know of the world to what they study in art. Therefore, the properties of a work of art can never be strictly formal, because they are always imbued with character and history that a viewer must decode in order to apprehend its meaning. Sikander’s animations are the perfect illustration of the complexities of the act of viewing.
I stood on the stairway between the upper and lower level of the galleries to watch The Last Post (2010), where I saw elements of re-created historical painting (from both Mughal and Company style) taken apart and remade into new
Confrontation, 2011; ink and gouache on prepared paper. Courtesy of the Artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
The Last Post, 2010 (still); HD video animation; 10 min. Courtesy of the Artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
configurations of image and ground, self and other, form and formlessness. Normally, looking at a picture takes time; one must observe and interpret the various elements, performing an operation that includes a multitude of conscious acts of thought and an instinctual grasp for significance. Watching The Last Post is like watching this procedure in slow motion. The difference is that the stability of the (single, unified) work is put into question and the dynamic energy of the animation in some ways overwhelms the model of perception. What is more, the work includes a sound element composed by Sikander’s collaborator, Du Yun, which contributes to its complexity by extending its phenomenal component beyond vision.
This is not Sikander’s first foray into animation. She created SpiNN in 2003 and Pursuit Change in 2004 (both represented in this show), both of which suffuse her existing imagery with the added dimension offered by film. While viewers are consistently amazed by the decorative arabesques of Sikander’s exquisite craft, her animations and videos focus the viewer’s attention on the conceptual domain of her images, demonstrating that every style, indeed every picture, is a means to reinvent the world. The most recent works in this show are politically charged (as her work has always been), focused upon colonialism and its legacy in art and contemporary politics. As a native of Pakistan who has resided for more than a decade in New York, Sikander is uncommonly aware of the ways that politics of East and West play out in life. Here she demonstrates how the historical moment might be given a new life in images and in motion.
The Company style, which Sikander references in her most recent work, was a body of art made by South Asians based on traditional miniature painting but retooled for the colonial elite, the British men who laid the groundwork for the expropriation of resources in what was then called “the subcontinent.” This hybrid style both obscured and revealed the uneven power relations in the colonial world, in which native artists repurposed their skills to produce decorative painting to suit new rulers. On one hand, these self-consciously quaint pictures, featuring colonial governors and businessmen in their domestic and professional domains, suppress the modern forms of dominance that emerged in the eighteenth century. On the other hand, various aspects of domination and its repudiation by artists are encoded in such apparently direct, or naïve, works.
Sikander seizes upon this double-edged condition of subaltern artistic production, and The Last Post draws its significance from this historic confrontation. The animation delivers a quasi-cosmic resolution between those who commission and those who create works of art. Watching the figure of the company man dissolve into his pictorial elements and literally explode into the cosmic soup seems like the fulfillment of a wish, a long-awaited demolition of an inherently destructive paradigm that the term colonialism can only begin to describe. Yet the artist also offers another explanation here based on the power of image and interpretation. What we see has the clarity of an image, and we put faith in the domain the image conjures, even if we know that certain details may not be entirely truthful. This ideology of the work of art’s fundamental authority is put under pressure here. How do we know that what the image seems to suggest is the message it actually subtends? Such questions abound in this exhibition, and they are the best reason to go see it. The meaning is not found in the picture itself, but in the dialectic between image and viewer, the space in between history and the present.
Shahzia Sikander: The Exploding Company Man and Other Abstractions is on view at the Walter and McBean Galleries at the San Francisco Art Institute through June 25, 2011.
As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is republishing Michelle Schultz's article "Huang Yong Ping: Across a Great Divide," on the artist's exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, which you can also read here at Daily Serving.
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With freedom of speech, artistic censorship and human rights at the centre of global concern with the arrest of Ai Weiwei, Huang Yong Ping’s show at Nottingham Contemporary, a young, highly influential contemporary art space run by Alex Farquharson just north of London, could not have come at a more pressing or pertinent time. Huang has been the target of protested censorship in the past, but has escaped the fate dealt to his contemporary—in part because he left China for France decades ago, and in part because he expresses his political views through his work, rather than his actions. Instead of brazenly speaking out and fighting for political and cultural freedom (which, as we have witnessed does not always bode well), he has remained silent and largely out of the spotlight, instead letting the work speak for itself.
The diasporic artist, born and trained in China, has made Paris his home since 1989 when he was invited to take part in the highly influential (and slightly problematic) exhibition, ‘Magiciens de la terre’ at Centre Georges Pompidou. He is described either as a French artist or Chinese artist, depending on what institutional powers are in control, and it is clear in his work that he, too, struggles to negotiate his own identity. Hybridity defines both his life and work as he constructs fantastical creatures and architectural imaginings by combining loaded visual references from Western and Eastern mythologies, religions, and contemporary cultures.
Bat Project IV is a highly contentious piece that dominates the exhibition—it is the remnants and legacy of a former work that was subject to brash censorship in 2001 when it was pulled from the Fourth Shenzhen Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition and again in 2002 when it was banned from the Guangzhou Triennial. The disputed claims and basis of the decisions to forcefully withdraw the work was a wholly political and highly unreasonable matter, much like the incident that spawned its inception.
In 2001 Huang Yong Ping set out to reconstruct segments of an American spy plane that crashed into a Chinese fighter jet. In the aftermath of the incident, the plane carrying sensitive information was grounded in China and an international relations struggle ensued. Eventually the plane was allowed to return to American soil—however only by being decapitated, dismantled and shipped back dishonourably in pieces.
Bat Project IV, 2005. Photo Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Courtesy of the Artist and Yu De Yao.
Marché de Punya (The Market of Merits and Virtues), 2007. Courtesy of the Artist and Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham.
Bat Project IV holds the traces of this story—an archive of material relating to the incident, its aftermath and the fate of Huang Yong Ping’s project. The hundreds of bats that inhabit the space symbolise a psychological divide between the East and West. Bats represent happiness and good fortune in Eastern mythology, and are considered a dark, rabid creature of the night in Western culture, the latter made quite clear in the shuddering response of the local audience to the preserved flock. One wonders how the reaction would differ if the work had been shown in Shenzhen.
The strength of Huang Yong Ping’s work lies in the animals—they provide a point of entry and are the key to his poetic metaphors. Taxidermied creatures that exist between species, cultures and meanings, they can only be understood subjectively; admittedly with my knowledge, dominated by western culture and ideas, many of the subtle references escape me.
In the installation Marché de Punya (The Market of Merits and Virtues) an elephant lies dead in front of a typical street shop market stall selling traditional Chinese carvings and banal household items—this symbol of wisdom and strength is overtaken by excessive economic expansion and forces of globalization, the plasticization of the western world defeating a power of nature.
While I may not relate to the cultural references present in many of the works, I quite knowingly grasp onto the concept of displacement and struggles with identity as a foreigner living in a place that is not my natal home. While the cultural divide between England and its colony is not nearly as drastic, and the language spoken (mostly) the same, there will always be differences, and a process of assimilating the divide. Since moving abroad, my awareness of Canadian identity has become heightened; particularly in relation to the neighbours in the South—a complex arisen from the deluge of inquiries that come from American friends and the vast amount of cultural differences we have surprisingly found. Interestingly enough, it is this relation that Huang Yong Ping alludes to in the work Amerigo Vespucci.
As an Italian bulldog, titled after the gentleman who arguably discovered America, urinates on the wall, the puddle that collects on the floor resembling the American landmass. The line of demarcation between the floor and the wall signifies the border between the United States and Canada, whose fluidity Huang Yong Ping sees as implying "extensiveness and overflowingness;" an example of all limits and borders as one drips into the other. It is this border that I relate to, the hardening of its fluidity in the past decade something I have experienced—a landmass seemingly becoming more and more divided as its borders are reinforced.
So what comes of all of this and where does it leave us? With political plays of power using citizens as pawns. Cross-cultural struggles for identity in a post-globalised world. Controversy and censorship at the forefront of the arts. Heady? Yes, and fitting indeed.
When viewed separately, Paul Graham’s photos are often unexceptional, but together, they can be breathtaking. Paul Graham: Photographs 1981–2006, the British photographer’s retrospective currently on view at Whitechapel Gallery in London, reflects the artist’s mastery of image sequencing and narrative, sampling photos from his series over the years. Graham is a storyteller: as in any good story, his characters are taken from reality and framed according to the artist’s imagination. Graham carefully brings these characters into focus or obscures them, utilizing the inherent subjectivity of the camera lens to explore different narrative points of view.
Taken between 1981 and 1982,thecollection entitled A1: The Great North Roadtransplants American road-trip-style photography onto Britain’s A1, the 410-mile-long artery that connects London to Edinburgh. The result is surprisingly cinematic; the photographs are not as big or as glamorous (and certainly not as sun-drenched) as some of William Eggleston’s roadside prints, but atmospheric and poetic in their bleakness. Empty diners, crumbling graffiti-scrawled walls, and ominous gray skies all feature heavily. In Little Chef in Rain, the ubiquitous roadside restaurant chain shines its red and white lights onto a glassy, wet nighttime road. The words “Safe Journey,” which are printed on the ground, offer drivers scant comfort against the dreary and desolate-looking backdrop. Perhaps the most powerful image in the series is the Ruscha-esque Burning Fields, in which a dilapidated sign reads “HOTEL” against a burning lot, the building apparently having been razed to the ground. A rectangle of flames marks the perimeter where walls would once have stood. Through this focus on destruction, the image is a stark picture of a recession-hit country.
Viewed together, the images present a perspective of Thatcherite Britain. It’s clear who Graham’s heroes are: a truck driver, his face handsome and worn with a lifetime of toil, gazing off into the distance; a cheerful and charming old café employee smiling into the camera. These men are among those who make up the backbone of Britain as the country’s working class, many of whom were blighted under the more brutal policies of the Thatcher years. Graham perhaps hints at the source of the problem with Young Executives (1981), in which two city boys in suits—possibly bankers—stand in the street grinning as they read a document. Viewers might imagine the document to be a bulging paycheck, or something that attests to the wealth accumulated by the business sector in contrast with the deprivation suffered by many in Britain’s North. Graham’s treatment of the two executives renders them anonymous and less human than their working class counterparts. While the truck driver and café worker are given central position, the executives can be seen toward the back of a busy sidewalk, their faces cast downward.
Graham’s controlled authoring of his work comes to the fore in A Shimmer of Possibility (2004-2006), a series in which short image sequences form cohesive stories. This is not to say that all of Graham’s photographs are without impact when viewed singularly. One image in the Pittsburgh 2004 (2004) series, for example, is striking in itself, depicting a man mowing a roadside lawn, with muffled sunlight filtering through clouds and droplets of rain visible in the hazy light. Graham conveys the intimacy of this simple act. But in combination with other images in this collection—the man is pictured at different stages of his work amid the surrounding scenery—the series becomes a vignette, contextualized by the background views of the man’s life. An image of a copper-colored van parked in an empty suburban lot punctuates the photographs; bottles of barbecue sauce atop a supermarket shelf appear in another. It’s a truism to talk of the rhythm and poetry in mundane scenes of the everyday, but Graham is masterful at capturing just that and investing it with momentum and vitality.
End of an Age (1996–1998)—a series of large-scale portraits of twenty-somethings in undisclosed locations—showcases Graham's elegant sequencing. The images are sometimes color saturated, sometimes blurry, sometimes shot with an unforgiving flash, and all appear to be taken at night—in bars and at parties. Many of the subjects smoke cigarettes, and some seem to be enjoying substance-induced highs. Not one looks into the camera lens. The images are positioned on the gallery walls so as to propel viewers around the room. Hence the subjects begin with their backs to the camera, gradually turning left toward the camera, then to the right. There is a certain headiness to this sweeping, 360-degree motion that reflects the languorous haze of the environments in which some of the photos were taken. Each anonymous individual seems caught between emotions, their expressions indicating private moments of uncertainty or escapism. The images convey a generation on the cusp of adulthood, unsure of themselves and of their place in the world.
The final room in the exhibition features a cabinet full of books created by Graham; the exhibition’s curatorial content stresses the importance of this medium for the artist, and one can see why. Readers are encouraged to find meaning in the combined force of the photographs when viewed between the covers of a book. Graham acknowledges the short stories of Chekhov as a strong influence, but there is also something of the cut-up technique in his work—he brings images together in seemingly random juxtapositions, asking viewers to draw connections. Taken collectively, Paul Graham Photographs 1981–2006 is a vision of the past twenty-five years that is both an anthology of extremely personal stories and a powerful work of social commentary.
Paul Graham: Photographs 1981–2006 is on view at Whitechapel Gallery in London through June 19, 2011.
Create, an exhibition curated by Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum (BAM/PFA), is an astonishing exercise in line and pattern. Work has been culled from three groundbreaking arts organizations supporting artists with developmental and physical disabilities: Creativity Explored, in San Francisco; Creative Growth, in Oakland; and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities (NIAD), in Richmond. The exhibition, which generously fills three of the museum’s galleries, gives these artists the space and contextualization they have rarely received in past exhibitions.
The exhibition layout and curatorial decisions allow wide space for reflection, and each artist is well represented. Their work is not arranged by organization; in fact, it is not explicitly clear with which of the spaces individual artists are associated. Instead, the show is arranged to communicate the modes of art production perpetuated in the three partnering organizations. Abstraction, the exploration of masking both physical and metaphorical layers, repetitive images, and text are present in the various groupings in each gallery.
For example, Evelyn Reyes depicts abstract renderings of one shape or object in multiple colors and orders. James Montgomery paints clocks and watches in tight and frenetic molecules of movement, while other artists, including Bertha Otoya, William Tyler, and John Patrick McKenzie, use text and repeating phrases to create graphic narratives of depth. A viewer has the opportunity to learn a great deal about the artists by seeing multiple works and to understand their practices as a relevant part of current art dialogues happening today.
The three arts spaces at the center of Create are independent nonprofit organizations founded by one couple, Florence Ludins-Katz and Elias Katz. Creative Growth opened in 1976, NIAD in 1982, and Creativity Explored in 1983, with its gallery opening in 1995. Although each of their histories and missions are unique, they are all committed to providing support and instruction to enhance the creative endeavors and professional art practice of artists with physical and mental disabilities. The artists who participate in these organizations often show and sell their work in the centers’ galleries as well as in exhibitions around the country. In the accompanying catalog, Rinder further describes what makes the philosophies the Katzes brought to these art spaces and their artists so special:
Their approach focused on a group studio environment, professionalism, and engagement with the broader art community. The progressive, inclusive social environment of the Bay Area
Aurie Ramirez. Untitled, 2000; watercolor and ink on paper; 15 × 22 in. Collection of Dave Muller and Ann Faison, Pasadena. Courtesy of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Jeremy Burleson. Installation view, Create, UC Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo: Sibila Savage.
facilitated the Katzes’ vision by providing many opportunities for involvement with practicing artists as well as a welcoming audience—and collectors—for the work made in each studio … The artists at the three Bay Area centers work alongside one another, create new works specifically for exhibition and sale, make frequent visits to local galleries and museums, and have regular access to artist mentors who assist them in developing new approaches and techniques.
Jeremy Burleson’s abstract paper-and-tape sculptures resembling cages or light fixtures hang from the ceiling to create an enchanting pattern of shadows against the wall. Underneath, his piles of paper needles, handcuffs, and ventilators are nearly too real to be dismissed, effectively conjuring up the unknown but eerily recognizable histories and experiences surrounding these objects that produce emotional or physical restraint.
Michael Bernard Loggins’ enormous numbered list, Fear of Your Life, is installed on the wall in vinyl lettering based on Loggins’ handwriting. His fears include #8, Fear of Strangers; #21, Fear of spiders and roaches and mouse raccoons and rats too; and #35, Fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is simple, honest, and funny—who doesn’t have Los Angeles fears (#31)? Higgs and Rinder made a brilliant decision to install it on such a large scale, as it invokes an overwhelming response. To Loggins’ list, I add my own fear: all of my fears written out for the world to see.
Aurie Ramirez opens up a terrifying and inviting imaginary universe complete with costumed, posturing, and masked androgynous figures whose genders are distinguished only by color: red for males and green for females. They lounge around in either tony houses or under streetlights, in a world that is both soothing and spooky. Ramirez is inspired by the band KISS, and the layers of theatricality and performance as evidenced by both the band and her drawings play on the desire to exist freely in pretend environments while using them as a means of escape from the real world. Either way, these are not paintings that easily leave your mind.
Indisputably, the work in Create is stunning. The layout and pacing of the show allows a viewer to deeply enter the complexities of individual bodies of work and artists’ practices. It also conveys a tone of being explicit about art-making. The exhibition does not blur the boundaries between artists with or without disabilities, but instead sharpens them. It is made clear that these artists were and continue to be supported by organizations that successfully recognize their needs both personally and professionally. These artists would not have been able to articulate through these visual tools without the kind of support they received by the partnering organizations, nor would we have been able to experience the cavernous depth of what it means to create.
“I am attempting to draw closer to the variable origins of change.” This poignantly open-ended quote by Zhong Biao published on the Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern website lured me into its new SoMa gallery to see his current exhibition, Reflected on Air. The exhibition comprises ten acrylic paintings on canvas completed in 2010 and 2011, ranging from compact twenty-two-by-thirty-inch exploratory compositions to awe-inspiring virtual worlds stretching over nine feet high and six feet wide.
Explosions of calligraphic, graffiti-like mark-making on the paintings’ surface complement the deep perspective of spatial voids and vanishing points, coalescing into legible illusions of infinity. Deploying this uniquely abstracted syntax, Biao’s painted narratives bleed from the recognizable past and present into the indeterminate realms of the future. The recognizable elements are decidedly urban and industrial, with a color palette dominated by flesh tones, black, white, and gray, though Biao sustains the verve and vibration of color with well-placed primary red, blue, and yellow accents. While these aesthetic color choices are sophisticated, Biao’s renderings of people and places appear crudely cartoonish. He retains the fine quality of his paintings by maintaining a mysterious distance from his human subjects and hard-lining his urban infrastructures.
Vague silhouettes appear on the horizon of Times to Come (2011) and Walking on Sunshine (2011). In the former painting, one of the smallest compositions in the exhibition, a dark red figure playfully dances with his arms outstretched and foot en pointe. He faces a more meticulously rendered young boy who kneels or crawls in the foreground. The boy is dressed in sneakers, blue jeans, and a red sweatshirt, yet he is no less mysterious, positioned with his back to viewers. These two figures are aligned along a diagonal vanishing point, like a continuum between present and future time, or like the detached otherworldly shadow of Peter Pan, an alignment fantastically warped by an explosive pocket of black-and-white paint.
In comparison, the silhouette of a man in Walking on Sunshine seems less temporally twisted, slipping instead into a world of Freudian psychoanalysis. With a shovel resting on his shoulder, he is perched beside the sun and above a
Journey, 2010; acrylic on canvas, 38 x 51 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco.
Home is Where…, 2011; acrylic on canvas, 79 x 110 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco.
faceless woman whose mountainous fleshy thigh occupies the foreground of the painting. Her string-bikini bottoms pulled down to mid-thigh match her candy-colored ankle bracelets, white stiletto heels, and pink toenail polish. Although the power relationship is pronounced and provocative, it is unclear whether the woman is passively domineered (a literal interpretation of Walking on Sunshine, her name being Sunshine) or actively aroused (as the colloquial interpretation suggests). In any case, romantic love is absent. Like the young boy in Times to Come, the faceless woman is a floating urban subject who exists in the surreal empty space of global industrial dystopia.
Biao paints trains, freeways, skyscrapers, and cars with a similar sophisticated and dystopian opaqueness. A militant black and red locomotive anchors the painted composition titled Home is Where… (2011). The train juts forward along a fierce diagonal vanishing point, with smoke or steam spewing from the front and trailing off like the triple-dot punctuation mark in the title; it is a painted ellipsis that inspires an unfinished moving thought or yearning feeling. People are immersed with the heavy machine, and they, too, are in transit, surrounded by pockets of atmospheric graffiti—variable origins of change.
The strength with which Biao’s surreal paintings reflect on the real conditions of contemporary life is exemplified by a photograph published in the April 2011 issue of Prospect magazine, a British publication that specializes in politics and current affairs. The photograph documents traffic congestion and accompanies an article written by James Crabtree, who poses the question: “With studies showing a decline in car use, are we seeing the beginning of the end for the car?”1
The composition of the Prospect photograph perfectly mirrors the composition of Biao’s painting Journey (2010), which depicts traffic from the rear with a ubiquitous procession of sedans, SUVs, taxis, and minivans. However, diverging from photorealism, Biao’s painted pattern of wheels, license plates, and brake lights dissolves into a colorless void. His extraordinary mirage is punctuated by a tiny black square in the distance, one that denotes the process and potential, as well as the origins, of change. The indeterminate forward momentum of Biao’s paintings in Reflected on Air is palpable and apropos of the contemporary moment wherein people are searching for ways to adapt failed industrial-era models of progress for the complex challenges of the twenty-first century.
Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa utilize distinctly divergent methods to confront and challenge the legacy of West Coast conceptual art and minimalism in a surprisingly harmonious two-person exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA). Both Los Angeles-based artists borrow physical elements from the diverse environment of Southern California in the service of subtle social and cultural critique. Contained within one gallery, Ochoa's imposing sculpture of metal poles and debris is suspended from the ceiling, while Appel's human-scale prints on canvas hang on the walls. Together the contrasting works create a tangible energy in the otherwise neutral space.
Ochoa's striking site-specific sculpture resembles a cross between a Gordon Matta-Clark building cut and a Louise Bourgeois spider. Seven steel poles bent at angles drop down from the ceiling, rooted in three mounds of crumbling concrete, suggesting resistance against a forceful upheaval from above. It contains both the rebellion against museum exhibition traditions of Matta-Clark and the suggestion of the unexpected power of Bourgeois. Ochoa combines Matta-Clark's use of the urban environment to create new perceptions with Bourgeois' ability to make social statements through sculpture.
A native of Southern California, Ochoa's work reflects on the socioeconomic boundaries demarcated by urban structures in the area. In an exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery, in New York, in 2009, Ochoa re-created a collapsed concrete freeway divider, physically splitting the gallery in half and suggesting the role of highways in the segregation of neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Similarly, his sculpture at SJMA, From the Ground Without Digging (2011), references chain-link fences, a signifier of the impulse to keep people out, as well as a material associated with construction workers more often than artists. By recontextualizing elements of city life in a gallery setting, Ochoa democratizes art viewing.
While Ochoa focuses exclusively on contemporary urban materials in the show at SJMA, Appel overlays geometric
Ruben Ochoa. From the Ground Without Digging, 2011; galvanized posts, metal plates, nuts and bolts, aggregate, sand, foam, and gravel; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo: Vijay Rikhra.
Kevin Appel. Screen (trial), 2011; acrylic and UV–cured print on canvas over panel; 77 x 58 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
architectural elements on natural scenes in his two-dimensional works. A seven-foot-tall decorative screen inspired by modernist architecture stands in the back corner of the room. Six rows of black enamel triangles, interspersed with the occasional pale blue and white pentagons, rotate on steel beams. The works on the walls of the gallery mirror these black triangles: painted grids over illustrations from nature magazines reprinted and enlarged.
In Screen (trial) (2011), Appel painted bold red, white, and blue pennants in a grid formation over two photographs of buffaloes engaged in a hostile encounter. A forceful modernist grid suppresses suggestions of the American flag and the Western frontier. In “Grids,” her 1979 essay on the grid as a symbol of the twentieth century, Rosalind Krauss states, "Flattened, geometricized, ordered, [the grid] is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal." By overlaying a strictly controlled grid on romantic images of wildlife, Appel suggests the intrusion of man-made elements on the rugged beauty of the West. Continuing his ironic critique of contemporary life through modernist tropes—a technique familiar from his meticulous paintings of architectural interiors from the 1990s—Appel appropriates the grid for his own devices.
Ochoa and Appel employ different methods and materials to arrive at the same goal: a gentle interrogation of the supposed idealism of the western United States. Ochoa draws attention to socioeconomic inequalities in the Los Angeles area through his conceptual sculpture made from industrial materials associated with the working class. Appel, on the other hand, imposes modernist elements on images of utopian wildlife to create disquieting images that convey the struggle between man and nature. In Beta Space, the conjunction of the work of the two artists builds a palpable tension without resolution.
Beta Space: Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa is on view at the San Jose Museum of Art through August 14, 2011.
Lately, when flying, I’ve noticed fellow passengers roll their eyes whenever the captain announces, “If you look to your left you’ll be able to see such and such iconic feature of the American landscape.” Maybe Google Maps is to blame. Or maybe the in-flight movie really is more interesting than watching the Wasatch Mountains roll by. Nevertheless, Alex MacLean’s aerial photographs in The American Landscape at the Tipping Point challenge such indifference by allowing viewers to peruse the backyard of America—especially those parts not seen from commercial airlines—on pause. Shot between 1984 and 2010, and stretching from Florida to California, The American Landscape shows the spectacular confluence of nature and modern technology.
The landscapes, mostly unremarkable deserts, take a back seat to the graceful lattice of interconnecting highways, the elegant bodices of networked pylons, the majestic geometry of grounded B-52 bombers, and the gorgeous maze of wind turbines. The size, scale, and desolation of these images underscore the confused sublimity of technology and the vapid sterility of landscape. So when images such as Turkey Point Cooling Canals, Homestead, Florida (2007) and Concentrated Solar, Clark County, Nevada (2009) are juxtaposed, they break down the unsteady divide of the natural versus the unnatural. This dichotomy disintegrates due to the irony that Turkey Point, a nuclear power plant, seamlessly blends into its environment, while Concentrated Solar, a solar plant, looks ridiculously out of place—kind of like a giant storm drain in the middle of a desert. All of a sudden the artificial starts to look more at home in the natural environment.
Another critical shift in the terrain comes via another pair of related images, Umbrella Territory, Camaiore, Tuscany, Italy (2010) and RV Storage Facility, Sun City, Arizona (2005). From a distance, both Umbrella and RV share a hypnotizing grid of patterned objects—umbrellas and RVs, respectively—atop what looks to be concrete. This distant perspective immediately relates them to Ed Ruscha’s Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967), a series of aerial
Concentrated Solar, Clark County, Nevada, 2009; chromogenic print, edition of 9; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.
Umbrella Territory, Camaiore, Tuscany, Italy, 2010; chromogenic print, edition of 9. 60 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.
photographs of deserted Los Angeles parking lots. Of the series, Ruscha said, “Those patterns and their abstract design quality mean nothing to me. I'll tell you what is more interesting: the oil droppings on the ground."1
Ruscha’s pattern-breaking, anomaly-seeking logic points to the importance of shifting scales, particularly in images like MacLean’s in which scale is everything. A closer perspective of Umbrella and RV, for instance, reveals that the concrete in Umbrella is actually a beach, a beach littered with sunburnt topless women in white thongs and boys playing with toys. And in RV, amongst the sea of homogeneous RVs all neatly parked at a sixty-degree angle, subtle portraits of play peek through; jet skis and fishing boats, like lost outliers, gain emphasis on a human scale.
Besides Ruscha’s work, The American Landscape also shares affinities with Koyaanisqatsi(1982), a cult film that also scrutinizes the dynamic tension between nature and civilization in America through the critical lens of the aerial perspective. Subtitled Life out of Balance, Koyaanisqatsi, like The American Landscape, points to the precariousness of the environment at the threshold of development. The difference in media, however, drastically distinguishes the two. Koyaanisqatsi employs slow-motion and time-lapsed footage that begins with nature and ends with culture. The American Landscape, on the other hand, captures nature and culture already entangled, like a readymade, or an object to be (re)considered in its current context. While the former suggests the tipping point has already happened, the latter asks us to reconsider what an American landscape should be pointing to, let alone tipping toward.
The American Landscape at the Tipping Point is on view at Robert Koch Gallery, in San Francisco, through July 2, 2011.
________ NOTES:
1. David Bourdon, “Ruscha as Publisher (or All Booked Up),” Art News 71 (April 1972), 34.
As part of our ongoing partnership withDaily Serving, Art Practical is republishing Catherine Wagley's article "Peace of Mind," from her weekly column, "L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast," on Camilo Ontiveros' exhibition, Some Boxes and Two Photographs About America, at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles, which you can also read here at Daily Serving.
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Most good artists moonlight as social historians at least some of the time. Often, they’re as bad at it as real-deal historians are (just think what sort of voluptuously erroneous textbook Gauguin would’ve written on the Polynesians, or what might have happened if a Damien Hirst gem-encrusted skull had launched a scholarly inquest into diamonds in the Congo). Bad history doesn’t preclude good art, of course; sometimes it even propels it (depending on who you ask, Gauguin and Hirst are cases in point).
Being a both good historian and a good artist only seems to work for rare individuals like Jeffrey Vallance—his faux Nixon Museum and serious study of "Painter of Light" Thomas Kinkade wreaked of well-researched sincerity—whose sense of what matters happens to be soaked in idiosyncrasy to begin with. But of late, some more doctrinaire, less idiosyncratic artmakers have adopted a connect-the-dots approach to history and cultural commentary that seems to work quite nicely: pull together a careful collection of socially charged moments, set them out in the world, and let them do their work.
Camilo Ontiveros connects dots in his current exhibition, Some Boxes and Two Photographs About America, on view at Steve Turner Contemporary. Even his title evokes the un-boundedness of his narrative slant. From the street (this gallery often hangs work in its front window, a shtick that, on occasion, makes serious ideas feel like teasers), you can see a poster-sized photograph of a Navy billboard targeted at Latino youth. The young soldier it features squints in the sun, which casts a dramatic, flattering shadow down the middle of his face. He looks a little too small and awkward in his white uniform, however, and it’s hard to imagine him uttering the words “Este Es Mi País” (or “This is my Country”), spelled out beside him, with much gusto.
Este Es Mi País, 2011; inkjet print, 30 1/2 x 71 1/2 in. Courtesy Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles.
The Burial of Anastacio Hernandez, 2011; installation view. Courtesy of Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles.
Inside, Ontiveros has installed an extensive collection of motley security system boxes, all variations on red, white, and blue—granted, some “white” boxes are practically brown and some “blues” are closer to gray; still, it’s got a patriotism to it that’s quaintness like a faded Norman Rockwell. In fact, the installation, called It’s Not Just Security, It’s Peace of Mind, feels like a museum collection of nostalgic relics from the ’50s or ’60s, just after our wartime prime. The boxes are neither obsolete nor expressly old, however. Ontiveros assembled them recently, while working as an alarm system installer here in SoCal.
Invasion is a repeat theme in Ontiveros’ work. Security boxes exist to keep invaders out and the Navy has served that exact same purpose from time to time. Step into the back gallery at Steve Turner, and you’ll find a shrine to one particular invader stopped at the San Ysidro border a year ago. Called The Burial of Anastacio Hernandez, the shrine consists of a photograph of a funeral and two candles on a pedestal. The Anastacio in question had been deported after living in San Diego for eighteen years and died in May 2010, beaten by police and shot with a stun gun as he tried to cross into the U.S. The case was publicized but never quite notorious, and Ontiveros’ installation won’t add any notoriety. It’s familiar enough to seem like any other present-day shrine, but minimal enough to avoid triteness.
The Burial is the only piece in the show not for sale. This feels indicative of the kind of artist Ontiveros is—not unreasonable (the boxes can all be bought), but tactful and concerned. Mexico-born, California-based, he’s regional first and foremost, a designation far more muscular than derogatory in this globally-obsessed world. He cares about what goes down in the swath of land between where he comes from and where he lives now in a possessive, sometimes indignant way. In Some Boxes and Two Photographs About America, he’s tying together moments with a quiet intensity, asking us to follow the thread and piece together a story—this time, about how invasion and our obsession with it has gone too far.
Some Boxes and Two Photographs About America is on view at Steve Turner Contemporary, in Los Angeles, through May 21, 2011.
I first saw Charlotte Salomon’s work at the Royal Academy in London in 1998. This exhibition and the subsequent tour were the beginning of a deeper recognition of Salomon’s legacy of around 1,300 notebook-size gouaches, 769 of which form the astounding autobiographical operetta Life? or Theater? (1940–42). Since then, her work has been thoroughly documented and analyzed as both a historical and personal record and a significant artistic achievement. Yet it remains first and foremost a unique, partly fictionalized visual journal of sorts, and I was looking forward to deepening my acquaintance with it at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM).
Unfortunately, however, the rather strange exhibition design at CJM, which, viewed generously, could be understood as an attempt to break up the narrative into digestible segments, made a closer encounter difficult. It is partly the wealth of images in their uninterrupted flow and the complexity of the many-sided narrative that make the work the magnum opus it is, and this abridged version of almost one-third (278 gouaches) of the total oeuvre cannot do it full justice. As seen at the CJM, the installation perhaps gives us a sense of Salomon’s life as a young Jewish woman and artist, at least offering a familiar type of fragmentary, bullet-pointed portrayal, but it does not reveal the scope of her artistic achievement nor of the times in which she worked.
And yet, Life? or Theater? does not fail to move, engage, or provoke the second time around, and neither does the story of its genesis or creator. Made in just under eighteen months by a young woman reeling from the revelation of her maternal family’s history of depression and suicide and seeking a way out of the madness she feared would engulf her, the work represents its protagonist’s intent to “create a story so as not to lose my mind.” Catalyzed at the onset of World War II and during the height of the Holocaust years when the world itself seemed to have gone mad, the frenetic artistic activity that resulted in Life? or Theater? embodies not only Salomon’s race against insanity but also her sense of impending doom. Unfortunately, the latter fear was borne out by the artist’s arrest while in exile in the South of France and by her subsequent execution at Auschwitz in 1943.
Salomon’s molding of a portion of her visual diary into a musical drama, done to underscore the fictionalization and diffuse the horror of her life and times, is indicated by the work’s subtitle, “Ein Singspiel,” and structure. No doubt informed by her stepmother’s successful career as an opera singer, the work overflows with transcribed arias, folk, and popular songs of the time. It is structured in three parts, consisting of a prelude, a second act, and an epilogue. The prelude is devoted primarily to charmingly detailed scenes from her protagonist Charlotte Kahn’s childhood; the main part to Alfred Wolfsohn, her stepmother’s voice coach (and apparently Salomon’s first love), and Charlotte’s discovery of his ideas about art and the soul; and the epilogue concerns Charlotte’s life on the Côte d’Azur. The characters are partly renamed; Salomon’s father, the surgeon Alfred Salomon, appears as Alfred Kahn, and her stepmother Paula Lindberg
Untitled from Life? or Theatre?, 1940-1942; gouache; individual dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. Copyright Charlotte Salomon Foundation.
Untitled from Life? or Theatre?, 1940-1942; gouache; individual dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. Copyright Charlotte Salomon Foundation.
as Paulina Bimbam. This allows Salomon enough distance to weave the personal narrative of a young girl striving to find her voice as an artist with a larger social narrative. The title indicates the exercise of a meditation about the human condition, as more pessimistically evaluated by Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Salomon never answers the question, “Life? Or theater?” But when entrusting this work to a friend shortly before her arrest, the author allegedly told him, “Keep this safe. It’s my entire life.” As has been well documented, the primary condition of exile is isolation. There were countless manuscripts produced, countless poems written and pictures made during those years by exiles, and also by internees, all over Europe and in the United States. All of these activities implied an awareness of, and a desire for, a potential audience, albeit not of contemporaries. These works were made to be seen someday.
And what of the gouaches themselves? The earlier passages are joyously and colorfully articulated, expressing the happiness and innocence of her parents’ courtship and Charlotte’s early childhood. Often many scenes are woven into a single page in a style approaching animation—as when her mother is depicted waving her father off on his train ride to the Front and then returning to their empty home. These sequences carry the narrative forward in a dreamlike condition evoking Chagall’s at once realistic and magical portrayals and creating a marked contrast with what follows. Gradually the gouaches change, depicting single scenes and becoming increasingly abstract as Salomon’s focus shifts from happy material memories to more-tortured psychological complexities. The textual narration also transitions in tone—becoming despairing and ironic at times—as well as location, from transparent overlays into the picture plane itself. At the same time, the letters and words begin to take on a curiously animated, anthropomorphic form, as they do, for example, during the passages where Amadeus Daberlohn (Alfred Wolfsohn) debates the genesis of artistic creation with a painter friend. Recumbent, their figures are repeated across many pages and are crowned by the phrases of their conversation. During the horrific sequences relating to her grandmother’s suicide, the words—in bold, red brushstrokes and washes—emulate the blood of her body, crushed by its fall from a fourth-floor window.
Classically trained at the Berlin Kunstakademie, which in the years when she was there (1935–37) espoused National Socialist ideals, Salomon seems to have found her inspiration in “degenerate” artists from Munch and Grosz to Kirchner, Chagall, and Modigliani, and at times her paintings recall Blake’s mystical and visionary illustrations from Songs of Innocence and Experience. However, Salomon was perhaps less interested in exploring their formal approaches to improve her own than she was in using painting as a strategy to save and understand life. When Charlotte tells Daberlohn that he “would be a wonderful subject for a portrait,” the irony of his whispered aside, “Little girl, if you only knew what one has to go through to be able to paint,” is not lost on us. As she painted, Salomon became aware of the decisions she made in depicting her life, and ultimately it is these that transform her autobiography into art and gave her the strength to live her too-short life to its conclusion.
Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre? is on view at the Jewish Contemporary Museum, in San Francisco, through July 31, 2011.
Although Ratio 3 has admirably refrained from overstating Takeshi Murata’s show Get Your Ass to Mars, the gallery provides a rather simple interpretation of his show. The press release explains that the objects in Murata’s computer-generated imagery (CGI) appear “eerily real, accentuating their strange relationships with each other as they rest in a timeless abstract space.” While Murata may, as the press release continues to state, explore the tension of still images, he also establishes a complex set of self-referential propositions about image production and technology through formal references to seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas painting, commercial photography, film, and popular culture.
From a contemporary perspective, seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings appear as realist still lifes of rather familiar and innocuous objects. However, these paintings frequently combine lilies, skulls, hourglasses, and lobsters to symbolically moralize about virginity, death, temporality, and luxury. As with Dutch vanitas painting, issues of mortality, vice, and vanity may be symbolically read into Murata’s highly rendered (digital, rather than painted) still lifes. Murata actually uses some Dutch still-life symbology (fruit, eggs, and skulls), but adds objects from pop culture and media that, while appearing mundane, also create an intricate set of references to the vanity and vice of modern life.
In Art and The Future (2011), Murata juxtaposes eggs, oranges, a skull, driving gloves, a marijuana pipe, a microphone, and the book also entitled Art and The Future. The head-shop ceramic skull with inset laser beam eyes tchotchke and a nearby marijuana pipe are campy references to mortality and vice. The microphone and driving gloves suggest the vanity of celebrity and materialism. Murata has constructed a modernist set of plinths that segregate the objects into a vertical hierarchy. With an anthropomorphic resonance, the skull sits highest, the microphone in the second tier, while the eggs, oranges, marijuana bowl, driving gloves, and book constitute the bottom two levels. Like slick commercial product photography, Murata’s stark CGI images have an almost seamless background where the lighting is artificially isolated for perfection. While the CGI is well executed, Murata refrains from making the image truly believable by leaving the surface of the oranges and shadows slightly simplified in an acknowledgement of the artifice of his images.
Murata cultivates similar ideas in Cyborg (2011), in which a shell replaces the black skull in the center of the image. In lieu of the clean white plinths, Murata uses a faux brick cardboard box and VHS tape of the science fiction film Cyborg to create some vertical spacing and hierarchy. In addition, Murata uses mirrored arc forms to eerily double the shell, faux-brick plinth, and lemon, creating a sense of spatial ambiguousness. While the lighting is fairly neutralized in Art and The Future, in Cyborg,Murata uses dramatic colored lights; the latter
Gumbone and Coke, 2011; pigment print, 23.2 x 32 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.
Art and The Future, 2011; pigment print, 32.5 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.
piece shares a similar lighting aesthetic with Dario Argento’s horror films, specifically Suspiria (1977). Murata also references the legendary horror filmmaker in his image Salon Kitty (2011), which actually includes a VHS tape of Argento’s Terror at the Opera (1987).
Following the moralizing of Dutch vanitas, Murata mines many layers of sexual symbols within his works. Within Salon Kitty, he has placed a VHS tape of the actual sexploitation film by the same name. In addition, in Jazz Funeral (2011) and Gumbone and Coke (2011), brass instruments possess a flaccid and soft sculptural quality, and appear to be made of latex, bubble gum, or felt. While the objects are suggestive of phalluses, the dumbness of the lumpy horns seems rather self-consciously comic and campy. The trombone in Gumbone and Coke begins to look like one of the crude latex prosthetics from an early David Cronenberg film, which were frequently phallic or vaginal in reference. In Golden Banana (2011), the cow skull is suggestive of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, in which skulls or flowers are often literally represented, but are also suggestive of vaginal forms. However, in Murata’s Golden Banana,the pile of bananas and penultimate golden banana contrasts the suggestion of vaginal imagery. While Murata includes sexual symbols in his work, their absurdity and self-conscious directness cause them to possess a rather deadpan comic feel.
Murata displays a great deal of self-referentiality through a series of media references. In Expanded Cinema (2011), he includes Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book by the same title. The book, which examines the technical and conceptual aspects of video and multimedia as art forms, balances somewhat unrealistically on a tennis ball. In addition, Murata references a number of 1970s and ’80s horror and science fiction films. In these films, dystopian and utopian narratives interlace reality and artifice to address our ambivalence about the extent to which our lives are increasingly reliant on technology. Moreover, these fantasy films are shot with sleight-of-hand special effects and CGI to create constructed realities that blur the boundaries of believability.
While Murata’s highly rendered CGI images come across as being located in contemporary digital technology, many of his visual cues date back thirty or forty years. Through its inclusion of ’70s and ’80s horror films on VHS tapes, the media format of the ’80s, the work delves into the past. This revisiting becomes even more elliptical, as many of these films had futuristic narratives. Moreover, the high key color and simplistic geometric forms (cylinders, arcs, and wedges) that dot his still lifes harken to the early ’80s, when CGI was just beginning and popular culture became infiltrated with simplistic computer-generated forms.
While Get Your Ass to Mars, the title of Murata’s show, may seem unnecessarily provocative, it is a line in the film Total Recall (1990),a movie in which perception becomes muddled and reality and the virtual overlap. In his work, Murata repeatedly creates tensions about representation, in terms of his media and his images’ symbolism. Moreover, his elaborate set of illusions provokes questions about how one may read his images and his artistic intentions. His work balances a deadpan delivery with some fairly academic references to create a rich visual and conceptual duplicity that allows for multiple interpretations.
Get Your Ass to Mars is on view at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, through June 11, 2011.
Brightworks is a new, unaccredited K–12 private school co-created by Gever Tulley and Bryan Welch somewhat in the tradition of anarchist-leaning Free Schools. The opening ceremony, held at the end of April at their large, ex-industrial space at Bryant and Mariposa streets in San Francisco, was part gallery opening (paintings, wine, and adult hors d’oeuvres) and part school open house (prospective parents, hands-on activities, and a school band). Brightworks styles itself as “an extraordinary school” and seems set up to provide a unique educational experience, one that is bound to appeal to many artists, curators, and others interested in alternative educational models. While not an art project, it is informed by a certain idea of art practice: unscripted inquiry, guidance by example, learning by making, individual paths, intensity of experience, and self-expression. It could be called an education conducted as if it was art. Undoubtedly an adventurous initiative designed with great care, thoughtfulness, and evident passion, there is nevertheless something troubling—and politically dubious—about what it proposes, at least as it is currently articulated.
For Tulley and Welch, the best way to express the essence of Brightworks is to get out some butcher paper and Sharpies and draw a diagram of “The Arc,” the school’s signature three-phase curriculum structure. The Arc consists of “Exploration” of a theme (the “curated” phase), followed by “Expression” (collaborative creation), and finally, “Exposition” (public presentation, discussion). A child’s schooling will consist of four to six arcs per year, forty to seventy overall. There are no standards and no tests. The arcs could cover a great range of things. The example activities tend toward making, but not exclusively so. The suggested themes (such as “The Wind”) tend toward the poetic-scientific, but not necessarily. A child may not work with the same collaborators across successive arcs, so that each child will experience a unique course of study.
The child’s relationship with others will also be expressed in the design of the space, which is raw and empty now. The basic build-out will be done by the firm 450 Architects (who did the San Francisco Waldorf High School), but much of the space will be taken up by an “emergent architecture,” a “favela” (in Tulley’s queasy analogy) of four-by-six-foot “refuges,” each one scratch-built by a child. It is a rule that a child will never be bothered, neither by adults nor other children, when in his or her refuge. For Tulley and Welch, the refuge adds something essential that is crucially lacking in the Free School model.
The school is already fully enrolled for the upcoming fall. Brightworks took thirty students from 250 applicants and plans to grow to a maximum of eighty students in the coming years. Annual fees are $19,800, although as at other private schools, there’s a sliding scale. Half the students are admitted at reduced fees. While Tulley and Welch express an intention to diversify their student body over time so as to better reflect their local community, so far recruitment has been self-selecting, drawing families largely from the organizers’ existing networks. It will be a challenge to return to the public a project created in withdrawal from the public.
Brightworks expands upon two out-of-school summer camps that the organizers developed independently. Welch’s camp, A Curious Summer, uses the city and wider world as an expanded field of ready-made resources and expert tutors who can be visited in their domains. It is the basis for the Exploration phase of The Arc. Tulley’s Tinkering School (the basis for the Expression phase) is more about making. It centers on a belief that children can build things you couldn’t imagine if you give them the means and free them from artificial rules and constraints. He stresses, for example, the value of putting serious tools (power tools, saws, knives, etc.) in the hands of children. His Institute for Applied Tinkering, the nonprofit under which Tinkering School operates, is Brightworks’ fiscal sponsor.
Brightworks' opening ceremony, April 2011, San Francisco. Photo: Bryan Welch.
Are the experiences offered by A Curious Summer and the Tinkering School of better quality than out-of-school programs offered either by the city or by other nonprofits—826 Valencia (described by Welch as Brightworks’ “pedagogicial mother”), Streetside Stories, Youth Speaks, Bay Area Video Coalition, and so many others? It is hard to say. But education is not only, or even primarily, about quality of experience. Those other nonprofits couple creative practice with a commitment to social equity. And whether through out-of-school-time programs, or by interventions in the school day, they supplement the public education system. A Curious Summer and Tinkering School take no view about recruitment or whom they serve. They are boutique summer camps, and that’s fine. But Brightworks, as a full-time school, goes further. It presents itself not as a supplement, but as a substitute, and much of what is troubling about the project concerns this move.
Tulley and Welch are motivated by despair at what they see as the degraded character of public education. I expect Brightworks’ parents and collaborators feel this, too. While some private schools may aim for their students to achieve social and economic status in later life, Brightworks’ core mission is to provide a pedagogical alternative. (Tulley and Welch are negotiating with elite universities to recognize their future graduates, but that’s not their primary goal.) But whether you’re buying your child social advancement or the chance to be always self-actualizing, the impact on public education is the same.
Despite funding cuts, the disadvantaged conditions of the families they serve, and the perception created by Waiting for Superman, the reality of public schools is not one of systemic failure. One of public education’s biggest problems, however, is private education. Private schools absorb, not only the money, but also the care, solidarity, and political capital of middle-class parents—and that’s what the public schools need. The core of childhood education is not aesthetic engagement, but social equity. The worst thing you can say about an educational system is not that it is boring, but that it is unjust.
Watching Matthew Barney’s latest film, Drawing Restraint 17 (2010), at the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival, I was reminded of the experience of walking past pristine, monumental minimalist works at Dia: Beacon. Located along the Hudson River in New York, the gallery is housed in an enormous warehouse space that was formerly a printing factory and is set amid a lush green (and red, yellow, amber, and pink if you go in fall) forest that populates the surrounding landscape. Michael Heizer’s awe-inspiring North, East, South, West (1967/2002)—vast black geometric shapes cut into the gallery floor—viewed against the greenery that appears through windows behind it, makes the natural world, by comparison, mere decoration. I was left wondering how a structure conceived of and built by humans could appear more ancient, and more mysterious, than nature itself.
A similar juxtaposition is set up in Barney’s Drawing Restraint 17, the seventeenth part (and the third to use film as its medium) in a series, which, to sum it up in one phrase, “proposes resistance as a prerequisite for development and a vehicle for creativity.”1 The series began in 1987 with Drawing Restraint 1, in which Barney straps elastic restraints to his thighs and places inclines at the edges of his studio, thereby imposing on himself a series of physical obstacles to completing a drawing: to reach the blank walls of his studio would be a triumph of athleticism and will—components the artist deems necessary for artistic production.
The opening shot of Drawing Restraint 17, a film silent throughout and set in Switzerland, reinforces Barney’s preoccupation with production and labor: the scene depicts a set of hives around which worker bees anxiously buzz. The screen is then split for much of the film’s first half. On one side, a young farm girl with blond braids—a quintessential Heidi—pulls a roughly cast spade out of a trough and begins digging, for what we don’t know. On the other side of the screen, Barney, alone in the Schaulager Museum in Basel, puts markings down on the gallery floor and is later joined by a team of installers who carry in large columns of wood and assemble a sculpture—a rhomboid-like shape that they cover with a plastic sheet. Between the bucolic farm scene and the stark museum space, the latter environment is the more productive. Barney’s workers are successfully constructing; the farm girl’s digging is futile. Like Heizer’s installation set against the dense forest, contemporary art and architecture here pose greater challenges, and bear more significant fruit, than a natural environment.
Apparently failing to find what she’s looking for, the girl gets on a train and heads to the now deserted Schaulager. She scales a gargantuan gallery wall in what is a notable departure from Barney’s typical role as protagonist. While the girl replaces him as athlete, however, Barney remains as artistic producer. Rather than resulting in a drawing—the usual product of Barney’s epic athletic feats in this series of works—the girl’s climb culminates in a literal and metaphorical fall: into the sculpture below. This seems to be the logical endpoint of a narrative heavily laced with metaphor; the girl’s loss of innocence has been signalled by her stepping out of the pastoral fold, allowing her hair to fall free from her braids while on the train, and removing her trousers at the museum. Furthermore, the farmyard setting in which the girl first appears is, in fact, the grounds of the Goetheanum, a building located near Basel and named after Goethe. The Goetheanum acts as the world center for the anthroposophical movement founded by Rudolf Steiner, which posits the existence of a spiritual world accessible through sensory experience.
As always with Barney, the densely intertextual and symbolic nature of his work establishes many layers in which to locate meaning. Whether the girl undergoes a Faustian fall or gains access to a spiritual world through her interaction with physical space, her final fall is unspeakably beautiful. Shot in slow motion, she breaks through the white sheet, which billows out like ghostly fingers as she tumbles into what appears to be a bottomless black hole or portal. Barney’s workers have created a transformative environment. Like Heizer’s North, East, South, West, which emanates a kind of mystical energy, there is a quality of magnetism surrounding Barney’s sculpture and his treatment of the Schaulager. If this were a sci-fi film, the museum would be the nerve center that presents the heroes with their greatest and final challenge.
Drawing Restraint 17 throws up more questions than many other works in the series (with the exception of Drawing Restraint 9, which is as complex as any of his Cremasterfilms, and as full of petroleum jelly!), but the central premise is still realized. The girl’s plunge into the sculpture completes the work: following the shoot of the film, Barney’s sculpture remained as part of the Schaulager’s exhibit, its plastic sheet ripped through the middle. The girl’s efforts have then not been in vain, and resistance and release have once again fulfilled their role as agents of the creative process.
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