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

Indelible Fables is on view at Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, in San Francisco, through February 25, 2012.

________
NOTES:

1. Donald Kuspit, The End of Art (Cambridge, U.K.; Cambridge University Press, 2004), 192.

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 Fur No. 2, Fox Fur No. 3, and Fox Fur No. 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.

________
NOTES:

1. Stephen Wirtz Gallery, Todd Hido: Excerpts from Silver Meadows press release, http://www.wirtzgallery.com/main.html

2. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 32.

text.

Kota Ezawa. Moon from Earth / Earth from Moon, 2011; Two Duratrans transparency & two lightbox, Left Lightbox: 22 x 32 x 2 inches / Right Lightbox: 26 x 26 x 2 inches. Ed. of 7. Courtesy of Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

Kota Ezawa. Nature Scenes, 2011; 9 mounted stereographic prints & plywood viewer, Viewer: 9 x 7.5 x 15 inches / 9 slides, each: 3.5 x 7 inches. Ed. of 5. Courtesy of Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

text.

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. The immersive 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 Willem De 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.

________
NOTES:

1. From the press release, Ratio 3, 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.

________

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 with Daily 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 at Daily Serving.

________

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.

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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.

More American Photographs is on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, in San Francisco, through December 17, 2011.

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NOTES:

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.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resettlement_Administration

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.

!Women Art Revolution was screened at the Roxie Theater on October 11, 2011, as part of Bioneers Film Night.

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.

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NOTES:

1. Unfortunately, this image has not been released for use by the press, but you can see the entire album here: http://www.clarkart.edu/exhibitions/pissarro/content/slideshow-turpitudes-sociales.cfm.

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.

Blank, 1978; paintstick on Belgian linen; two parts, each 120.25 x 120.25 in. Collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © 2011 Richard Serra / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Gianfranco Gorgoni.

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.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January 16, 2012

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 merely ironic 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 Me is 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

2. Bishop, Claire. “Public Opinion.” Artforum.com, October 29, 2009. < http://artforum.com/diary/id=24062>. Sourced October 13, 2011.

3. Smart, Alistair. “Ai Weiwei – Is his art actually any good?” The Telegraph, May 6, 2011. < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/8498546/Ai-Weiwei-Is-his-art-actually-any-good.html>. Sourced October 13, 2011.

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.

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NOTES:

1. William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 3^rd edition (New York, Phaidon, 1996), 409.

2. http://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=2386

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.

Lonely Angler, 2011; digital photographic collage; 32 x 97 in. ©2001 Yang Yongliang/Galerie Paris-Beijing.

Ode to the Goddess of Luo River, 2011; digital photographic collage; 37 x 138 in. ©2011 Yang Yongliang/Galerie Paris-Beijing.

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 Story Short 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.

Residency Projects II is on view at Kala Art Institute and Gallery, in Berkeley, through October 15, 2011.

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NOTES:

1. Full disclosure: The author is a CCA alumna, former Wattis employee, and former Kala intern (1998–1999).

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 

Mz. 410. irgendsowas. (Mz. 410. Something or Other.), 1922; collage, fabric, paper and turkey feather on cardboard; 7 1/8 x 5 3/4 in. Courtesy of the Kurt Schwitters Archives at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover and teh UC Berkeley Art Museum. Photo: Michael Herling / Aline Gwose, Sprengel Museum Hannover. © Artists Rights Society, New York.

Mz 371 bacco (Mz 371 bacco), 1922; collage of cut and torn printed, handwritten, tissue, and coated papers on paperboard; 6 1/4 x 4 7/8 in. Courtesy of the Menil Collection, Houston and the UC Berkeley Art Museum. Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston. © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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 is on view at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum through November 27, 2011.

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

Peter Bissegger. Reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau, 1981-83 (original ca. 1930-37, destroyed 1943); 154-3/4 x 228 3/8 x 181 in. Courtesy of the Kurt Schwitters Archives at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover and the UC Berkeley Art Museum. Photo: Michael Herling / Aline Gwose, Sprengel Museum, Hannover. © Peter Bisseger.

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.

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage is on view at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum through November 27, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1.http://merzbaurekonstruktion.com/impressum.htm

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. 

________
NOTES:
1. Pier 24 Photography. http://www.pier24.org/.

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.

3.http://www.mildredslane.com/projects/2011_drift/index.php, accessed July 26, 2011.

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.

Bay Area Now 6 is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, through September 25, 2011.

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NOTES:

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).

4. http://www.ybca.org/ban6-visual-exhibition

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 Max movies (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.

Matrix 162: Shaun Gladwell is on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, in Hartford, CT, through September 18, 2011.

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.

Heterotopias is on view at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum through September 18, 2011.

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) employs a 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.

Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, through September 11, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. http://whitney.org/file_columns/0002/5626/arcangel_brochure.pdf

2. Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings 1966-1990, ed. Gabriele Guercio (Boston: MIT Press, 1991).

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 viewing becomes 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

The American Room (still), 2009–10; single-channel video projection, dolby digital encoded surround 5.1 channels; 24:29 min. Courtesy of the Artist and galleries Yvon Lambert, Micheline Szwajcer, and Hauser & Wirth. © 2011 David Claerbout.

Sections of A Happy Moment (still), 2007; single-channel video projection with stereo sound; 25:57 min. Collection of Aaron and Barbara Levine. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. © 2011 David Claerbout.

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.

David Claerbout: Architecture of Narrative is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through September 6, 2011.

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, Sławomir 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).

2. From the exhibition brochure, http://theinadequate.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/guia.pdf

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-portrait behind 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.

Hannah Hanna: Frames of War is on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art through September 10, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. Determined in conversation with Susan O’Malley, the show’s curator.

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 to Build 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).

2. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. “Joshua Tree National Park: Homesteaders,” December 25, 2010. http://www.nps.gov/jotr/historyculture/homesteaders.htm. Accessed June 4, 2011.

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.

Moving Violations is on view at Brian Gross Fine Art at One Post Street, in San Francisco, through July 1, 2011. 

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 Trailer Motel. 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.

Train of Thought is on view at the Oakland Museum of California through August 14, 2011.

________
NOTES:

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.

Huang Yong Ping is on view at the Nottingham Contemporary through June 26, 2011.

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, the collection entitled A1: The Great North Road transplants 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.

Bus Converted to Cafe, Lay-by, West Yorkshire, November 1982, from the series A1-The Great North Road, 1982; vintage color coupler print; approx. 8 x 10 in. (20 x 25 cm). Courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London. © Paul Graham.

Untitled #2 from the series End of an Age, 1997; pigment ink print; approx. 70 x 53.5 in. (178 x 136 cm). Courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London. © Paul Graham.

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.

Create is on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum through September 25, 2011.

“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.

Reflected on Air is on view at Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, in San Francisco, through June 25, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. James Crabtree, “End of the Road,” Prospect, April 19, 2011, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/04/end-of-the-road/

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 with Daily 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.

DRAWING RESTRAINT 17, 2010; production still. ©2010 Matthew Barney. Courtesy of the Gladstone Gallery, New York. Photo: Hugo Glendinning.

DRAWING RESTRAINT 17, 2010; production still. ©2010 Matthew Barney. Courtesy of the Gladstone Gallery, New York. Photo: Hugo Glendinning.

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 Cremaster films, 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.

Drawing Restraint 17 was screened at the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival on April 30, 2011.

________

NOTES:
1. “Drawing Restraint 9,” Filmmaker, September 5, 2005, http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2005/09/drawing-restraint-9/

“Get your ass to Mars. Get your ass to Mars. Get your ass to Mars” repeats like a mantra on a bloodied video screen showing a scene from Total Recall (1990), a sci-fi classic starring action film–legend Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film, based on a text by Phillip K. Dick, has acquired a residual cult following and is even in the process of being remade, with the former State of California chief executive rumored to have a cameo role. Takeshi Murata appropriates this line as the title of his current solo exhibition at Ratio 3. This exhibition is more figurative—featuring digitally rendered still-lives as opposed to the dense video abstractions of his earlier works.

Get Your Ass to Mars references a moment in cinematic effects production when digital computer graphics were in ascendance but coexisted with physical manipulations of latex, animatronics, and miniatures in front of a lens. This is not to say that these production relationships have been severed in the past two decades—they are still essential—but contemporary digital texture and lighting techniques have unequivocally taken over the field, providing films with a grit of the hyper-real. Movie audiences are keenly aware of this as they flock to experience the next comic-to-cinema spectacle.

Murata’s still-lives are innocently retro, composed of such traditional still-life subjects as fruit and shells, as well as sci-fi VHS tapes, art texts, and beer cans displayed among primitive geometric forms. For example, Cyborg (2011) focuses on a conch shell resting on a box procedurally textured with a

Cyborg, 2011; pigment print; 28 x 42 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.

I, Popeye (still), 2010; single-channel video; six minutes. Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.

simple brick pattern. It is accompanied by a scattering of Plasticine-looking lemons and a VHS tape of the Jean-Claude Van Damme martial arts film Cyborg (1989). The arrangements are lighted in washes of saturated color that are gathered into the renders with a striking beauty, reminiscent of paintings crafted in oils. Compositionally, the spaces are antiseptically tactile, abounding with perfect reflections and unmarred surfaces; absent are the displacements and occlusions that formulate the grime and grit of contemporary computer-generated imagery (CGI) realism. In the service of these still lives, Murata harnesses the computer not as a producer of spectacle, but as a renaissance tool—a mathematical engine for composition of geometry, perspective, and light. They are images that evoke visual contemplation over emotional entertainment.

In the back room, Murata screens a charming animation titled I, Popeye (2010), a 3-D cartoon in the tradition of the Fleischer Studio. Such a direct retelling is a brave choice, as the character of Popeye will not enter into the United States public domain for over a decade. Tragedy drives the narrative: Popeye loses his job, gets evicted, goes on a spinach-fueled violent rampage, greaves for the deceased Olive Oyl and Sweet Pea, and ultimately takes his own life. Punctuating the animated short are dream sequences and psychedelic freak-outs wherein Popeye pilots a gleaming gold hot rod. The story is a dark coda of realism that inevitably follows the heroic exploits of Popeye as eras and time leave him behind. It is reminiscent of the descent of Major Tom in David Bowie’s Space Oddity (1969) and Ashes to Ashes (1980) through Hallo Spaceboy (1995). Depicting Popeye’s libratory transcendental dreams, the tragic retelling of him as a broken man contemporizes and builds humanity within the Depression-era cartoon icon—all without depriving him of his sense of humor.

Get Your Ass To Mars is on view at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, through June 11, 2011.

On April 27, the pranksterish collaborative the Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF) arrived at my alma mater, the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), in a limousine painted to resemble a yellow school bus for their tenth stop on a five-week, eleven-city tour across the United States.¹ At each destination of Teach 4 Amerika, which is sponsored by the New York–based nonprofit public-art program Creative Time, BHQF has challenged art students to reconsider the terms, methods, and purpose of their educations. They posit that the proliferation of BFA and MFA degree programs in this country—over nine hundred at last count—has led neither to a corresponding increase in contemporary art’s reception in the broader culture nor to an expanded market in which more artists can sustain themselves by sales of their work. Instead, according to BHQF, it supports a self-perpetuating, peripheral industry around art and contributes to the increasing professionalization of the contemporary art world.

All these conditions—the glut of academic programs, artists’ narrowing access to the art market as their numbers rapidly increase, the progressive isolation of contemporary art within a sphere of similarly educated participants—have been pressing topics of conversation for several years and urgent ones since the 2008 economic collapse. They’ve also been the impetus for the rise of alternative pedagogical models by which artists self-direct their research and curricula. So the precept behind Teach 4 Amerika—that aspiring artists should eschew formalized art education in favor of such alternative models in order to reclaim their artistic agency—has much traction and would have resonated more strongly in the rally if it hadn’t been grounded in the outmoded premise of the artist as an autodidactic bohemian.

Students entered the lecture hall to the brassy, booming sounds of the San Francisco Gay/Lesbian Freedom Band  and to a room full of red, blue, and yellow balloons. As they settled in their seats, one member of the collaborative, wearing a rubber Nixon mask, danced at the front of the room while shooting into the crowd tie-dyed T-shirts and royal-blue felt pennants declaring the event a “rally for anarchy in arts education.” The other members of the group sat in the front row, taking photographs, eating pizza, or drinking Maker’s Mark. When the supply of T-shirts was nearly depleted and the room almost full, a BHQF artist named Seth delivered a PowerPoint presentation.² Interspersed between clips and stills from the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, other bits of popular culture, images of Obama, statistics on arts education and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design were images of a young woman, who, as the child of white, middle-class, divorced professionals and a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, presents BHQF’s archetype for an art-school undergraduate.³

As Seth unpacked her story with deadpan humor, he interwove a set of statistics based on current market conditions that refuted the potential for an art student to graduate with any reasonable expectation of a career as an

Teach 4 Amerika, 2011; poster. Courtesy of the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Creative Time, New York.

Teach 4 Amerika, 2011; excerpt from rally in Pittsburgh, April 2, 2011. Courtesy of the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Creative Time, New York.

artist. From this, he suggested that the academicization of art does no more than produce underemployed adjunct professors and perpetuate a professionalized culture that feeds into a system of self-reflexive activity. While no one would argue against the near-futility represented by the ratio of BFA- and MFA-adorned artists to galleries, the presentation, in also decrying the National Endowment for the Art’s recent initiative to promote the idea that art infuses life into local economies, suggests that most relationships between art and money are sullied.

Instead, BHQF spins out an aspirational and, at times, contradictory proposal for a new kind of art education—one organized around individual artistic concerns that foregrounds, once again, the critical self-discovery in which an artist engages. They conduct such a program in New York at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University. From this model, artists can counter the alienation between contemporary art production and its reception by a general public by operating with a network of peers to produce programs and activate spaces for showing work. In this model, art ceases to be perceived as another engine of the economy and is restored as a vocation, embedded with all the ideals of the Enlightenment, beginning with individual liberty. The entire presentation was delivered with a healthy dose of irony, and any investment in this aspiration was undermined by a film clip of one of the inmates in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest breaking out of the asylum and running across a bucolic meadow in the early dawn light.

But the irony and willingness of BHQF to admit their own complicity in—and benefits derived from—the current market-driven machine did little to untangle their presentation’s contradictions or dampen the skepticism with which it was met. As I noted in the Q & A session that followed, just how do the self-directed activities and spaces that this peer-oriented model would produce differ from the alternative spaces, art magazines, apartment galleries, etc., that graduates from academic programs currently produce? Few members of the audience seemed to find credibility with the stance that the current educational system accomplishes no more than bending artists to the will of an industry it is simultaneously creating or with the idea that this industry is a closed loop that precludes the participation of anyone who is not similarly educated. But the flimsiest element of the proposal was its basic premise: the idea that because economic opportunities may be limited, artists should eschew them altogether in favor of autodidatic introspection. The disconnects that Teach 4 Amerika highlights between art as the pinnacle of cultural production and the limited popular engagement with contemporary art, or between the high cost of art education and the lack of economic agency for individual artists are severe enough to warrant the level of scrutiny a nationwide tour proposes. But, despite the pennants, the marching band, and the call for anarchy, the ritual of the art school lecture remained intact: a presentation followed by a Q & A. The conversation was the most heated part of the evening, and while many of the comments called for BHQF to acknowledge their agency within this system, there were no outcries denouncing the institution that most readily enables these conversations to occur. The lecture over, students departed in murmured conversation, some stopping to talk to Seth while others went out for cigarettes, and someone started breaking the balloons, in an effort to straighten up. 

Teach 4 Amerika took place at the San Francisco Art Institute on April 27, 2011. An invitation-only discussion took place the following evening at Southern Exposure, San Francisco.

________

NOTES:
1. The Teach for Amerika tour began from New York on March 29, 2011. It included stops in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Denver, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, and Portland, in addition to San Francisco.
2. The Bruce High Quality Foundation has always claimed anonymity for its participants; here, that condition was greatly relaxed, as none of the artists were masked except for Nixon, and Seth identified himself.
3. In the presentation, BHQF notes that 70 percent of art students are female.

In 1809, the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss published Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientum (Theory of Motion of the Celestial Bodies Moving in Conic Sections Around the Sun), which introduced the idea of the Gaussian gravitational constant. Gauss is responsible for our modern understanding of magnetism and for the term “degaussing” (the process of decreasing an unwanted magnetic field was named after him). 

Hunter Longe’s new body of work, Degausser, is a meditation on the literal and conceptual manifestations of magnetism and polarity. Longe incorporates video, drawing, printed matter, photography, and found objects into an installation that quotes his twentieth-century art-historical forefathers through the suggestion of skewed perception. Longe has taken the degausser—a device used to correct magnetic imbalance in a device like a television—and reversed its utility. He discovered that the device could be used to distort an otherwise normal video or set a clock running backward. The term “degaussing” can be applied to the multitude of ways Longe has found to obscure, distort, and conceal found images and objects.

Notably, Longe’s exhibition is the inaugural venture for The Popular Workshop in its new capacity as a gallery featuring the work of emerging artists. The Popular Workshop is also a creative agency and design studio, now merging its interests in the overlap between art and design. Longe fills the gallery’s cavernous and somewhat idiosyncratic space in interesting ways; a twenty-by-forty-foot graphite wall drawing, Magnetic Field Study Enlarged 20 times (2011), provides an apt backdrop (visually and conceptually) for the smaller works

Gerhard’s Müller Behind Plastic, 2011; graphite on paper, mounted on panel; 41 x 29 3/4 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Popular Workshop, San Francisco.

Degausser, installation view, the Popular Workshop, April 2011. Photo courtesy of the Artist and the Popular Workshop, San Francisco.

on view. Framed works on paper and video pieces are clustered in groups, with backward-running clocks scattered intermittently, creating a kind of Twilight Zone atmosphere. The exhibition is a whimsical display of framed pieces and small, antiquated television sets placed on staggered, wall-mounted shelves. The presentation has the feel of a minimal and outdated department store, thrown uncontrollably out of whack.

Many of Longe’s pieces riff on the visual ideas of late twentieth-century artists such as Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, and Wallace Berman, paying particular attention to Bay Area darlings of the Beat generation. Most notable among these pieces is Gerhard’s Müller Behind Plastic (2011), an exquisite to-scale pencil drawing on paper of Gerhard Richter’s oil painting Portrait Müller (1965), wrapped in plastic. With a piece like this, Longe demonstrates amazing technical expertise while ruminating on the seemingly impossible task of any young artist: to make something new. Longe’s solution is to cleverly admit that this pursuit is inevitably futile. Instead, Longe quotes his idols in ways that remind us of the complex system in which older pieces of art and contemporary artists coexist in the world. It’s clear, in looking at Gerhard’s Müller Behind Plastic and understanding how it was made, that Longe has been privy to the inner sanctum of storage for works like the Richter painting. Art icons of the late twentieth century are crucial parts of Longe’s visual lexicon; when he sees a hand holding a degausser, he sees Wallace Berman’s talismanic reproductions of transistor radios. He quotes these icons in a manner that simply emphasizes their ubiquity—a pithy reminder that these images are always hanging in the air. 

Astutely bridging Longe’s veneration of his artist-heroes and his interest in magnetic force is the theme of perception—and, more specifically, the distortion of perception—which runs through much of the work. Post Flip (2011) is an oversize lens neatly embedded in the gallery wall, through which visitors can look from the main exhibition space into a smaller, transitional space between the gallery and studio offices, observing the scene as the lens of a camera does—inverted and distorted. Works like Negation (2011), a found photograph framed and obscured by an acrylic, monochromatic square painted on the glass, illustrate the idea that art is about the visual mediation of experience—and our perception of art made by another person, at another time, is both obscured by the removal of time but at the same time made clearer by the richness of personal meaning and individual subjectivity. Like Longe’s ode to Richter, Post Flip and Negation are among the most successful works in the exhibition, as they allow viewers to see the world as only Hunter Longe sees it.

Degausser is on view at The Popular Workshop, in San Francisco, through June 17, 2011.

Bob Newland’s photographs on view at the People’s Gallery capture the agony and ecstasy of the American rodeo. These are not idealized or stylized portraits of the American West. Shot at rodeos mostly in South Dakota between 1977 and 1984, these stark black-and-white prints convey the sport’s immediacy and violence. Taken from the floor of the arena, they bring viewers to the center of the action—much closer than even the spectators who were actually there. Instead of iconic images of American freedom and individuality, as images of the rodeo are often interpreted to be, Newland’s photographs proffer a more ambiguous perspective of individuals struggling with animals and seldom emerging victorious.

In Newland’s rodeo pictures, nothing is static: horses buck, riders are thrown, and clods of dirt fly as seasoned cowboys look on. In one image, a young girl, teeth clenched, struggles to stay atop a calf as a rodeo clown looks over his shoulder at her. The strength of the image lies in the tension between the girl’s toughness and her vulnerability. Though she is a female participating in a male-dominated sport, this means little to the calf. In another photograph, viewers get a glimpse of what may be coming next: a rider hurtles toward the ground face-first, while the horse that has just thrown him kicks out its back legs. The crowd stares dispassionately. This time, the rider is male, but he is still a youth, and this heightens the impact of the violence. Although the works capture specific moments, they have a timeless quality; indeed, the images could easily have been shot fifty years ago or more.

The photographs themselves tell only half of the exhibition’s story, however. This series is not new, after all, and Newland has all but abandoned art photography since these photographs were taken, instead focusing on art in other media, commercial photography, and marijuana advocacy, among other pursuits. The prints on display at the People’s Gallery have been in storage in the artist’s garage for years, and many of them bear signs of wear. The reason for the re-examination of this series lies in the mission statement behind the People’s Gallery, which is itself an extension of the People’s Biennial.

Conceived by Jens Hoffman, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and artist Harrell Fletcher, the People’s Biennial is a response to the increasingly insular nature of contemporary biennials, which tend to focus on work from a few cities by artists already entrenched in the established art world. As an alternative, Hoffmann and Fletcher selected five artists from each of five cities outside of the contemporary art orbit: Portland, Oregon; Haverford, Pennsylvania; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Newland’s Rapid City, South Dakota. The artists are both those who are considered outsider artists and those whose work—like Newland’s—is due for a critical reappraisal. The People’s Biennial will travel between these five cities in institutions that “must be in locations that lie outside mainstream art centers, but in places where art nonetheless thrives.”¹

Melissa Carroll, Les Crago Memorial 4H Rodeo, Belle Fourche SD, 1981; silver halide print; 8 x 10 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and People’s Gallery, San Francisco.

Brett Jarman, Pennington Co. (SD) 4H Rodeo, Rapid City, South Dakota, 1983; silver halide print; 5 x 7 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and People’s Gallery, San Francisco.

The People’s Gallery, organized by Fletcher, Hoffman, and Jana Blankenship, exists as an offshoot of the People’s Biennial. It will be open for only one year and will provide six artists featured in the exhibition with an opportunity to show their work commercially in a professional setting in which they may have never exhibited. The organizers cite two touchstones: Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which serves to give voice to those disenfranchised by traditional histories, and art collective Group Material’s 1981 exhibition People’s Choice, which highlighted work from residents living on the same New York City block as Group Material’s storefront.

Undoubtedly, the established art world is too often an insider’s club, closed off to all but a few outsider artists who are welcomed into the canon, such as Grandma Moses or Henry Darger. Looking beyond rigidly defined artistic channels has often been a productive way to enliven staid practices. Artists, writers, and curators have historically rebelled against such confining systems, whether they are the academic restrictions of nineteenth-century France or the elitist gallery scene of 1980s SoHo. And now the People’s Gallery and Biennial are situated within this lineage.

What this exhibition is missing, however, is a clear contextual foundation. Although Blankenship gave me a thorough explanation of the gallery’s origins and mission, without this there was little information at the gallery that situated it and the exhibition within a larger framework. It’s not clear why the organizers chose these five cities and these twenty-five artists. Though the curators undoubtedly had good reasons as they visited each location, their research is not evident at the gallery. If the People’s Biennial and Gallery seeks to shift the focus away from isolated metropolitan centers to a more locally and community-oriented art experience, why not showcase local artists who work outside of the established San Francisco gallery scene? Indeed, was this not the focus of Group Material’s original exhibition—the striving for a connection between the group’s art practice and their community?

Though I applaud the organizers of the People’s Gallery and Biennial for bringing an alternative perspective to the traditional biennial format, it is unreasonable to expect this project to fulfill the overwhelming mandate to give voice to a nation of disenfranchised and overlooked artists. The mention of Zinn’s History, while perhaps an influential work, may distract from that at which the gallery actually succeeds. The goal the creators set for themselves is admirable, especially given the valid criticism that art institutions are increasingly out of touch with a general audience, and they deserve credit for simply attempting to bridge the gap between isolated art enclaves and the areas in between, where art is no doubt created and appreciated. Though they do not provide the definitive answer for challenging art-world elitism, the People’s Biennial does add a thoughtful voice to the conversation. And, in a way, Newland’s photos at the People’s Gallery are a fitting opening show for this project; both attempt to give agency to those toiling on the peripheries, against the odds, but the efforts of which reward contemplation.

Bob Newland is on view at People’s Gallery, in San Francisco, through May 7.

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NOTES:
1 People’s Biennial, curatorial statement. Independent Curators International.

Springtime rituals, like a good spring cleaning, are meant to bring a sense of transformation, a liberation from the past or a freshening up; but some things just don’t clean up all that easily. It’s vertiginous to contemplate the things we as humans use up and leave behind. I couldn’t help but think of the recent nuclear leaks in Japan and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as I strolled through Renée Delores’ exhibition Residue, installed with an elegant austerity at Martina Johnston Gallery, the gallery and living space of Indira Morre and Farley Gwazda. Delores’ diverse works track our material imprints upon the world within the remains of personal histories and human interactions with the nonhuman world. 

The works of Residue are based on labor-intensive processes and a ritualistic methodology of accumulating and purging traces of the past with a repetitive intentionality and tactile specificity. Some works are documents of transformative gestures; some are formed by breaking down and gathering residual materials; still other techniques are based on time-intensive processes of construction or reconfiguring from these remnants.

Prior Engagements (2011) is formed from the deconstruction of six gold rings, a bracelet, and a baby pendant, all inherited by the artist from her great-grandmother, great-aunt, and grandmothers. Delores melted down the gold from these pieces of jewelry to create a raw nugget, alchemically melding together objects that are individually held as precious and are imbued with personal histories, erasing the processes of their original crafting into a lump of unformed matter. There is a private, quiet violence to this disassemblage. The tiny lumpen gold ingot recalls an Eva Hesse or a Louise Bourgeois materialist sensibility, but in the artist’s intentional de-creation of it, the object suggests a more contemporary, conceptual nuance. Delores displaces the pieces of jewelry from previous economies and histories, stripping away all sentimental or easily readable exchange value within them. The gemstones are arranged on the wall in a kind of delicate, haphazard cataloging, held in place by tiny handmade brackets and specimen jars.

Much of the work in Residue consists of diptychs or clustered works grouped to highlight the relationships and negative spaces between objects. These arrangements form a kind of landscape in the space surrounding each grouping, so that the works in the exhibition begin to form a variable constellation. The diptych Residue (2011) consists of a large handmade spiral braided rag rug that looks like a large sun or eye. Made from six years of the artist’s discarded clothing, it hangs in conversation with a small circular frame of bright woven feathers taken from her parrot, The National Anthem—a black-capped lory. These two banners of parallel moltings concisely map the ways each creature’s bodily display individually marks the passage of time.

Delores collaborates with her bird again in Capillary Wave (2010). This piece consists of an elegant and tightly crafted blue and brown rectangular woven piece depicting a series of concentric ripples hanging next to a circular fragment of a woven basket that has been deconstructed by Delores’ bird. Together, the two pieces form a landscape of sun, land, and water, while the limp grid of the dangling warp threads

Mare Imperceptum, 2011; Duratrans lightbox; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Martina Johnston Gallery, Berkeley.

Prior Engagements, 2011; mixed media; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Martina Johnston Gallery, Berkeley.

balances out the dizzying, meticulous pattern of the fabric. Delores’ precise and skillful technique is given equal weight to the seemingly discarded object formed by the bird’s busy un-nesting work.

Initially, the artist’s inclusion of works formed by animal activity seems whimsical, but it underlines an interest in an experiential, nonverbal practice; it ascribes an agency to the animals and collapses the space between human and animal subjectivity. This gesture toward the erasure of difference is underscored by her inclusion of work by a parrot—an animal known for its distinctive form of mimicry. This level pairing of handmade and animal-made objects also draws attention to the imbalanced way in which we interact with the animal world.

Both Caffeine (2011) and Borne Witness (after Domenico Caramagno) (2011) document the impacts and reverberations of human violence imposed on animal life in the guise of scientific research or efficiency. Caffeine is a delicate, almost invisible piece, consisting of a web made of metallic thread and pins, modeled after a web created by a spider dosed with caffeine in a 1940s study of the effects of drugs on spiders. In contrast to the poetic reenactment of Caffeine’s web spinning, Borne Witness is a more straightforward memorial of traces left by dying bees poisoned with insecticide.

The work’s seriality and repeated spit bite aquatint circles display a kinship with a postminimalist aesthetic of repetitive mark-making, organic and geometric forms, and an attention to tactile materiality. In this way, they are reminiscent of Lucy Lippard’s 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction. Melting and deconstructing as entropic processes also bring to mind the work and writings of Robert Smithson, who is referenced within a recorded 1979 slide lecture by Lippard that is included as part of a diptych annexed in another room. Lippard’s talk at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture was based on her research for her seminal 1983 book Overlay, which traces a genealogy of prehistoric land art, public gardens, and modernist earthworks.

The projected Lippard images are paired with a slideshow that alternately documents a sunset and Delores’ reinterpretation of a Kukeri, a traditional Bulgarian ritual in which men dressed in furs, masks, and bells dance to chase away evil spirits and to ensure a fertile crop year. The figure, dressed in Delores’ skillfully constructed costume, appears to move backward away from the camera, creating a surreal sense of time flowing simultaneously forward and backward. In one sense, the non-synchronous pairing of Lippard’s text and images with the fragmented dance of the Kukeri configures Delores’ piece as an academic object lesson and Lippard’s muffled disembodied voice and idiosyncratic commentary as a found object. But the paired screens are also a way of framing Lippard’s broad-based, dynamic approach to research as parallel to Delores’ methodology. This work also appears to be an homage and acknowledgement of the influence of Lippard and the artists who are part of this lineage.

Delores’ strategy of folding this long history that Lippard has sketched out into her own exhibition recalls her other processes of melting or compressing—a kind of erasure of formal or temporal distinction. In Residue, Delores has formed a series of mini-monuments to a palpable, intentional entropy.

Residue is on view at Martina Johnston Gallery, in Berkeley, through May 22, 2011.

Walking into David Maisel’s exhibition History’s Shadow, at Haines Gallery, the viewer might not recognize the work as X-ray portraits of antiquities. Surprisingly, the textures, tones and effects created by this process are more enticing than clinical. Through the process of x-raying historical art objects in the collection of the Getty and of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Maisel proffers a particular view of history, one that is cloudy and delicate, yet revealing in unexpected ways.

The first image a viewer sees is GM3 (2010), the view through a statue of a horse.¹ In lieu of a traditional portrait of the exterior, of the textured hide or hair of the mane, Maisel’s X-ray delivers complete depth, from the thin, membranous outside to the structural elements and the final hollow core. The external façade is rejected in favor of a more complicated view, and here is where this work takes its strength. The animal in GM3 is simultaneously compressed and expanded; although the expected surface details are missing, more of the animal is ultimately shown: the empty barrel of the chest, the ovals of ribs, and cascading ribbons of the sculpted mane.

This horse is simultaneously frozen in time and animated by Maisel’s process. The head twists to the right, grimacing with an open mouth frozen in a whinny. The neck arches away and to the side, almost backward. Closer inspection reveals whorls, clouds, and spots on the image, like dye unfurling in water; the animal is both revealed and obscured in the places where the hot light fades to darkness against an inky black background.

History’s Shadow AV4, 2010; C-print;  image: 40 x 30 inches, framed: 42 x 32 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

History’s Shadow GM12, 2010; archival pigment print; edition of 7; image: 40 x 30 inches, framed: 42 x 32 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

In the X-ray, the horse appears struck by lightning—flooded with light, as if captured more by circumstance than by meticulous process. Maisel’s expressive power often lies in the paradox that the photograph creates: it announces some details and conceals others, resting on the border between ephemeral and concrete.

Other works in the show reveal less but still seduce, especially in relative position to one another. For example, AV4 (2010) is an X-ray of a handled pitcher with a spout. But the photograph discloses cracks and mends in the handle and a central fault line across the belly of the vessel. There are drips of glaze visible near the bottom of the jug and mysterious tracks along the neck. The X-ray depicts a ghost of the actual object, revealing a sense of the pitcher’s true thinness and fragility. Next to this work is GM12 (2010), a turbaned or crowned figure of a woman. In contrast to the pitcher, her figure has a depth and a solidity that belies her demurely downcast eyes. Where the light of the image gives way to darkness, there is a blur that implies movement. The sense of heaviness dissolves to wisps at her edge, reinforcing the impression that the figure was caught in motion.

In producing this work, Maisel seems to be asking some very big questions: What does it mean to see into the center of something? What can a clay statue reveal about the human condition? Each work in the exhibition has its own particular answer, from impressionistic to concrete, durable to fragile, but no single image can claim the authority of a final reply. On the whole, the work’s ephemerality demonstrates that history’s shadow may be less important than history’s light: a dim luster that tends to illuminate sensations and feelings much more clearly than facts.

History's Shadow is on view at Haines Gallery, in San Francisco, through June 4, 2011.

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NOTES:
1. Maisel titles his works according to the type of antiquity and the museum from which they originate. GM refers to objects from the Getty Museum. AB refers to Asian Buddhas (and other objects), and AV refers to Asian vessels in the collection of the Asian Art Museum.

Landscape painter Paul Wackers has come indoors. Idle/Idol, his current show at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, features mostly domestic interiors and still lifes in place of the buoyant, metaphysical landscapes that made his reputation. Having recently relocated to Brooklyn from the Bay Area, Wackers is looking for his new subject. Carefully examining the objects around him—rocks, beads, plants, and favorite ceramics—he is also inventing a pictorial space for them. Surprisingly, his schematic perspectives and spatial compression evoke early Cubist experiments with landscape and still life, as well as the early studio interiors of Matisse. Perhaps he’s been frequenting the New York museums as well.

Tree (2011) and Nothing to See Here (2011) feature abstracted plants on tabletops situated in interiors. In the first painting, a constructed tree balances on a beam at the extreme lower edge of the picture. A homemade contrivance, its stems and branches are tacked together by rivets. Its sparse leaves are collaged fragments that terminate at the ends of the branches. Wackers, like Braque, is a master of faux finishes, and the grainy wood floor and bright carpets establish a carefully delineated perspective. On the far wall, a gridded picture window reveals and bars the view outside. Hanging on walls in the painting’s second room are two Wackers pictures, which extend the perspective and echo the inaccessible virtual landscape. A stark white oval situated squarely in the center of Tree functions to flatten the whole, in much the same way Matisse’s black ovals did. (Matisse also painted his own paintings into his pictures. In The Red Studio [1911], paintings hang and are propped on walls in a skeleton architecture overwhelmed by a vibrant red that is floor, wall, ceiling, and air.)

In Wackers’ Nothing to See Here, a giant split leaf philodendron fills the entire frame. Its cutout spray-painted leaves and thick wiry stems press against the picture plane to create a claustrophobic space. The perspective box of the room is indicated by the receding borders of a carpet and two small landscapes on opposing side walls. (In one, a tiny wolf bays at the moon.) The rear wall is a blank grid—perhaps a window—underpinned by a stone wall. Elements of a virtual outside inhabit the virtual inside.

The Presentation of Choices Made (2011) depicts a curated collection of unrelated objects or talismans in a reflective

Tree, 2011; acrylic on panel, 48 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Eleanor Harwood Gallery, San Francisco.

Wait for It, 2011; acrylic and spray paint on panel, 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Eleanor Harwood Gallery, San Francisco.

glass vitrine lit from above. Plants, rocks, crystals, pots, and circular bands are simplified and rendered in bold strokes, each one painted differently. Do they embody memories for the painter? Wackers lifts them out of context, isolating and highlighting them, suggesting that significance, meaning, and value are conferred, not intrinsic.

The three new landscapes in the exhibition display Wackers’ virtuoso paint handling and his repertoire of styles and textural effects. Conceptually, they are studies in space compression, jamming foreground and background elements together. In Happy Camper (2011), a stream flows horizontally across the canvas, dividing two jumbled, crowded banks. On the near bank a pile of objects (Are they rocks? Clothes? The things they carried?) is reminiscent of obelisk piles seen in Wackers’ previous paintings. The objects are illuminated by and bound with lassos of vibrating neon spray paint. An assemblage of boulders and foliage on the opposite bank merges with foreground elements to undermine any feeling of spaciousness. Wait for It (2011), another closely cropped view, features a fretwork of lashed and painted poles draped with cords, threads, string, and beads, which create a gestural web of geometric and flowing lines across the picture plane. A pie-shaped “compass” establishes a floor in the forest, while dense foliage fills the negative space. A bar of silver spray paint lights up the scene with a fluorescent glow.

Human vision is discontinuous. A single visual record of an object or a vista represents a patchwork of stitched-together glances over micromoments in time. This multiplicity of impressions is what Picasso and Braque captured and recorded in their early analytic Cubist paintings. The resultant works had fractured, faceted surfaces with a haptic, almost tactile sensibility. Paul Wackers uses the same technique in his landscapes, juxtaposing and binding disparate forms, fusing foreground and background together to destroy any sense of rational pictorial space. He carefully choreographs illusionistic light sources within his pictures, making the occasional stroke of metallic spray paint all the more startling. A viewer’s eye travels across the disjointed canvas actively stitching together the patchwork of techniques, textures, and colors.

There is a sharp sense of nostalgia in this show. Wackers seems to be taking inventory, arranging, making comparisons, presenting the “choices made.” It will be interesting to see if he can invest his interiors with the power and punch of his former dramatic outdoor work. At the moment, he is a quiet intimist—on hold—recalculating and responding to new cues.

Idle/Idol is on view at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, in San Francisco, through May 14, 2011.

These days surveillance gets a lot of play in San Francisco. Sandra Phillips’ exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870 surveys the history of photography and surveillance at SFMOMA. Trevor Paglen and Michael Wolfe’s current shows at the Altman Siegel and Robert Koch galleries, respectively, both turn their attention to secret and not-so-secret manifestations of information gathering that monitor every aspect of contemporary life. But for street credibility, it’s hard to beat getting detained at the airport and turned over to the FBI for six months of interrogation, as happened to artist Hasan Elahi in 2002. Since he was never charged with a crime, he could not be exonerated. Though he was required to phone the FBI every time he left the country, Elahi invented a chilling alternative. He wrote a bit of code that would allow his location to be constantly monitored (amazingly, he had to invent this for himself); then he set up a website that tracked his current whereabouts and fed a stream of photographs that recorded every meal he ate, every train he took, and every toilet he used. Since Elahi is a media artist, such a device could be taken as a work of art.

Of course, the artwork, Tracking Transience (2004–ongoing), is not only the site itself, but the manifestation of it in the gallery at Intersection 5M as Hiding in Plain Sight. Entering the darkened gallery, one is confronted with no less than one hundred miniature flat screen monitors showing photos from Elahi’s daily life. A handful of taller flat screens on the far wall scroll through the artist’s recent credit card purchases and a large wall projection indicates the location of the artist in real time mixed with photos (this appears to be a live feed from the website). It is a dizzying array of visual information—the strangest self-portrait I have ever seen. Like any other portrait, it exposes only certain aspects of the subject and obscures others. From this, viewers have no idea what Elahi looks like, and this lack of features indicates no hint of the character of the person (though the cheekiness of some of the photographs do indicate a sense of humor, apparently toying with viewers’ curiosity). In fact, while the gallery presents thousands of relevant details about Elahi’s life, it is not Elahi who is the subject, but transience itself, and the need to monitor it. The question of who needs to monitor

Hiding in Plain Sight, 2011; installation view, Intersection 5M, San Francisco. Image courtesy of the Artist and Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco.

Tracking Transience (detail), 2004–ongoing; multi-media; dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the Artist and Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco.

it points to the political subtext of the work, but let’s face it, such is the condition of life in the twenty-first century. There are any number of social networking tools that exist to help us all monitor our own lives for Friend Brother.

The installation is replete with visual stimulation, but one has the sense of being in a control tower. Yet, the longer one looks, the more repetitive and banal the details become. Elahi seems not only aware of this, but bent upon demonstrating it in spectacular terms—and the project is without a doubt a success in this sense. Pictures of meals eaten at restaurants, beds slept in, airports transferred through, and urinals of all shapes and sizes eventually become a rhythmic visual drumbeat. Such a consolidation of facts cannot be denied, but it cannot provide the viewer with much empathy either. It is equally difficult to compose this material into a portrait of the artist as it is to imagine the significance of transience in contemporary life. The work is trance inducing, and one imagines just how boring the life of FBI agents—and members of other agencies that monitor human actions—must be. 

The only break to the rhythm consists of two live feeds of the world just outside the gallery. One single screen is placed along the floor and shows the parking lot on the other side of Fifth Street and the other, a set of six screens featuring a single image of the world across Mission Street. So here you are—viewer. As one watches the other screens, one tries to find traces of Elahi; but watching these flat screen windows, one finds oneself—not being watched, but apparently seeing through the walls. This x-ray vision plants the viewer in space and time, and reminds her that most of these images flashing by are a spectacular kind of re-run. The camera informs and connects, but it also separates us into the worlds we inhabit, the viewer and the viewed.

Hiding in Plain Sight is on view at Intersection 5M, in San Francisco, through April 23, 2011.

In her solo exhibition at Pro Arts in Oakland, Michelle Blade creates a mystical environment mired in the occult. Replete with gray shadows and translucent surfaces, the eerie installation suggests both an absence and a presence. A lone visitor to the gallery might almost expect to see a specter resting on a chair out of the corner of her eye. Curated by Jackie Im and sharing the space with an exhibition by the artist Taro Hattori, the show is part of 2 x 2 Solos, a series of one-person exhibitions featuring new commissions by emerging artists.

Blade employs a diversity of materials and mediums to evoke the supernatural. On the wall, a single slide shows a black-and-white image of two hands holding a gray piece of paper and another hand holding a crumpled and ripped page over the original. The faint outlines of two sets of fingers in the background appear unconnected to a body, disappearing into the blackness framing the image. The effect of three hands instead of two is also jarring. This slide creates the impression of doubling, a concept that repeats throughout the exhibition.

A chair draped in fine black lace sits on the floor, and a six-foot-tall wicker partition, salvaged by the artist and painted black, displays an intricate pattern that belies a distinct time period. In the corner, three wooden shelves at different heights hold charcoal-black urns and plastic plants painted a deep shade of crimson, representing the common theme of life and death that pervades the exhibition. A wooden minimalist frame juts out from the wall, loosely containing the sculptural tableau. This gesture both situates the work in a fine art context and acts as a portal to another world.  

Between the shelves and the slide projection, a framed 30.5-by-17.75-inch black photograph depicts an ivory lace blanket draped over an invisible form. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes asserts that the power of photography lies in its essence, its ability to express "that-has-been." According to Barthes, photography has an inevitable relationship to death because the subject of a photograph will always cease to exist.¹ Blade's haunted image literally illustrates this concept, suggesting a hidden shape shrouded by the cloth. Rather than capturing a human subject that will ultimately die, the photograph shows the absence of a person, the suggestion of a being that either never existed in a physical form or is no longer visible to the naked eye.

Untitled, 2011; slide projection, 33 x 37 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Untitled, 2011; wood, plastic, ceramic urns, ashes; 70 x 61 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Pro Arts, Oakland.

Two works on Dura-lar, a clear plastic sheeting material, share a Baroque sensibility that alludes further to history and the deceased. Hanging high on the wall, a thin wooden frame surrounds a colored geometric painting that mimics an ocular stained glass window. The other work, a rectangle of Dura-lar stretched over a canvas and painted on both sides with an olive-green pattern, has a yellowed quality that adds to the sense of lapsed time. The light seeping through the work allows for the doubling of the image.

The setting of Blade's exhibition is the only real impediment to its success. In the sterile environment of a white-walled gallery with large glass windows, the haunted environment is less believable than, for example, two Creative Time exhibitions in the past few years: Strange Powers in 2006, and PLOT/09: This World & Nearer Ones (2009). The former was installed in a supposedly haunted abandoned building in Manhattan's East Village, while the latter took place on the no longer inhabited Governors Island. Hopefully, Blade will continue this body of work and have the chance to display it in a less traditional venue in the future. 

The exhibition at Pro Arts is a distinct departure from Blade's earlier social practice–based work that celebrated community and displayed a rare optimism that counteracted the cynicism of much contemporary art. This show expresses uncertainty and even fear, a natural response to the current state of the world with its economic crises, terrifying natural disasters, and violent wars. However, the exhibition avoids delving into the sinister and overly serious, while also managing to eschew the ironic humor present in so many other contemporary artists' investigations into the occult.

2 x 2 Solos: Michelle Blade is on view at Pro Arts, in Oakland, through April 8, 2011.

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NOTES:
1. Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 14–15.

La Llorona (the Weeping Woman) is a pan–Latin American legend of Mexican origin. Versions of the folktale recount the story of a woman who, in a state of sadness, drowns her children. Her celestial punishment is to spend the eternity of death wandering the earth searching for her fallen children. Weeping, her specter haunts brooks and riverbanks. On view at Galería de la Raza, La Llorona Unfabled: Stories to (Re)tell To Little Girls utilizes this parable to re-examine Latina archetypes and posit strong, confident, if still melancholic, subjects.

The group exhibition focuses on the work of Ana Teresa Fernandez. In Untitled (Performance Document) (hair piece) (2011), a two-channel video installation, the artist submerses herself in the ocean at the San Diego–Tijuana border, just meters away from the border fence extending into the Pacific. These waters are known for their contamination by sewage runoff from the Tijuana River. On the left monitor, viewers see Fernandez’s bare upper back and the back of her head as she dunks her face in the water. The accompanying audio is the violent-sounding muffle of crashing and receding waves. At her face, Fernandez holds what appears to be a camcorder, and on the second monitor, this close-up is displayed. The artist’s wet hair resembles a weeping willow. She is like La Llorona, haunting this Californian beach. But their dispositions are not the same. There is a hint of defiance in the juxtaposition of the videos of Fernandez’s wet back and her weeping hair framing the border wall. This is an attack on the racist slur “wetback,” as the curatorial text explains in only slightly more explicit terms.

Ana Teresa Fernandez. Untitled (Document of a Performance) (hair piece), 2011 (video stills); video installation. Courtesy of the Artist and Galería de la Raza, San Francisco.

Geraldine Lozano. GeraLupe, 2010; C-print, production still. Courtesy of the Artist and Galería de la Raza, San Francisco.

Fernandez may be cast in a role—as La Llorona, as a wetback—but her fortitude casts herself anew.

In another video, Untitled (Performance Document) (shoe piece) (2011), Fernandez engages with the European fairy princess archetype, donning a pair of “glass slippers” made entirely of ice. She stands above a storm drain on an Oakland street. This night, her prince doesn’t come and her slippers melt, washing away into the San Francisco Bay. But she perseveres—alone. Although her face is unseen, the artist’s composure and stoicism are visible in her posture as she withstands her frozen footwear, straining to remain upright as the shoes disintegrate. Refusing to be La Llorona or Cinderella, Fernandez asserts that both pain and strength can coexist in the female body.

In the video GeraLupe (2010), Geraldine Lozano plays the role of the venerated La Virgen, patroness of the Americas. The irony of this patronage is never more apparent than it is at the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso border, where recent femicide has killed hundreds, if not thousands, and where women toil in the city’s infamous maquiladoras.¹ Human misery curses Latinas on both sides of the Rio Grande, while an apocryphal virgin commands the highest of respect. In an empty parking lot, Lozano stands at an ironing board, performing her domestic duties. The conflation of antithetical cultural signs—La Virgen laboring—brings this gender confusion to the fore. For women from the maquiladoras, women from the mass graves, and undocumented migrant women, the gulf between exaltation and degradation is the artifice of papal pronouncement. Lozano resists having the role of patron or victim decided for her.

La Llorona Unfabled is fierce and intrepid, but it is not naïve. The Latina body is under assault—from culture, labor, and policy. La Llorona persists. The exhibition does not ignore these impediments to a liberated life. Instead, it tackles them head-on. When one walks out of the gallery back onto busy 24th Street, these realities will still exist. But hopefully the proposition of an emboldened Latina will prevail as well.

La Llorona Unfabled: Stories to (Re)tell To Little Girls is on view at Galería de la Raza, in San Francisco, through April 16, 2011.

________

NOTES:
1. Maquiladoras are foreign owned factories that exist in one country and export the goods produced to other countries, profiting on the cheap labor. For more information, see Bay Area filmmakers Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre’s award-winning 2006 Maquilapolis, a documentary on the maquiladoras of Tijuana.

Isn’t It Obvious, on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Gallery through April 2, comprises a variety of works based in banal materials and subjects whose formal and metaphorical scope is expanded through simple, playful manipulation.

Jumping (2010), by Matt Kennedy, is a video playing on an analog monitor, perched on an eighty-four-inch-tall pedestal. The video shows a white wall and, occasionally, a man’s bespectacled face popping up from the bottom of the shot with the unmistakable cadence and movement of a person jumping. If the monitor were slightly larger, the face would be life-size and the effect would be as if a person were trapped in the pedestal, jumping up to peek out the window of the screen—which is, of course, impossible. The uncanny effect is elegant and enjoyable for its own sake, but also points out how familiar technologies can become intuitively invisible, in this case impelling viewers to suspend their own understanding of physics.

Kristina Lewis’ installation contains three interconnected sculptural elements titled Rigging the Weather, Sentry, and Apprentice (all 2009), which all use found umbrellas, piano wire, and metal hardware. The materials have been reconfigured and, through repetition, their once simple functional forms have taken on larger, mechanistic implications. The main body of the piece is dark and ominous, looming, suspended in the space, appearing to float above severely angled anchors, as if preparing for some weather event by going above and beyond the capabilities of our current technology.

Jasmin Lim’s photographs use translucent plastic sheeting and water to suggest, without revealing, some potential landscape or imagery. Occasionally a droplet will refract the pattern of a television screen, but there are few other clues to the source of her images’ gentle coloration, creating photos that oscillate between figuration and abstraction.

Lindsey White’s Rock (2010) is a digital video of a natural stone surface displayed on an analog monitor viewable through

Matt Kennedy. Jumping, 2010; video (duration 6 min 32 sec), pedestal; 84 x 23.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.

Kristina Lewis. Rigging the Weather, 2009; found umbrellas, cord, cable, piano wire, metal hardware, thread, adhesive; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.

a hole cut into a decorative plastic rock. The time-based footage is ostensibly playing, though the subject is inert. The video refers to a specific rock and imposes a deadpan expectation of closed-circuit simultaneity; while the plastic, fake-rock housing points to a categorical idea of rock-ness, its unconvincing surface texture and flimsy materiality are highlighted by the immediate comparison. Ultimately, the arrangement presents a dialog about presence and technology, because the fake rock, itself a technology to simulate a general rock, is present in the space and thus more physically real than the actual rock in the video. In both counts, technology stands in completely for the absent and obscure subject.

Arthur/Allan’s videos and found object installations examine the humdrum of city government. Desk on Desk on Desk (2011) is a set of three heavy wood office desks stacked directly on top of one another. Their patina of age and the similar design of the drawer pulls suggest an entrenched aesthetic tradition; and the stacking, which creates a furniture monolith, parodies administrative redundancy. Three utilitarian objects are made useless in this arrangement. Listed as "found in Veterans Building storage," the piece questions whether just the obsolete objects or the entire arrangement functions as a readymade.

City Hall (2011), a collection of short video pieces running in succession on three channels, shows the two characters of Arthur and Allan, played by artists Chris Sollars and Brion Nuda Rosch, dressed in matching slacks, dress shirts, and ties, climbing on public sculptures, impersonating statuary in city hall, playing with public hand sanitizer, and good-naturedly trespassing in unused civic spaces. Documenting simple, harmless, and amusing actions, together the shorts question the intended function of public space and poke fun at the expectation of propriety in places supposedly belonging to all of the city’s constituents.

Two segments in particular point to a critical aspect of Arthur/Allan’s reflexive process. Books by Allan on Arthur and Books by Arthur on Allan show the duo in a library, stacking books and fitting the namesake criteria on one another’s bodies. While the activity is schoolboy unruliness, as a metaphor, it enacts the reciprocal attention and validation that bolsters good ol’ boy networks and gray area ethics possible in any system of power.

Like City Hall, each work in Isn’t It Obvious creates multiple registers of meaning, retaining the simple legibility of its subject matter but pointing at larger questions. Each is, in its own way, a hack, a repurposing of an existent system. Arthur/Allan’s activities constitute a low-key building hack, and Lewis’ reconfiguration of umbrellas shares the same method of recycling with much humbler DIYs in ReadyMade magazine. White, Lim, and Kennedy refocus the inquiry of their work, departing from simple subjects to involve viewers’ expectations about media, physics, and technology.

Isn’t It Obvious is on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery through April 2, 2011.

Geography is a genre with long attestation in literate cultures. From Western antiquity’s first wandering inquirer Herodotos to the chronicler of imperial Islam Ibn Battuta and his contemporary Marco Polo, discursive writing has been deployed as a way of codifying alterity. I mean that such texts usually regiment a sense of normativity and identification within a certain culture. Contemporary capitalism has its own version of these investigative reports—the guidebook, which might currently be read most accurately as an index of what and where to consume: dinner, handbags, pyramids.

As the texts and images that purport to represent these non-native topoi enter a traveler’s culture, they establish a caché of fantasmatic information. Their narrative seductiveness vies with their stated intention to edify the reader. And, yet, photographs of one’s travels have become a cliché image for the torturously boring. Such banality bristles against the fact that travel remains a primary mode of transformation, assisted by the saturated era of high-speed journeys (for our bodies) and Flickr tags (for our imaginary relations to other places)—a reciprocal transformation that applies to travelers’ bodies, sure, but that also transforms the places into which travelers enter via their native experiences, customs, and cash.

The irruptive simultaneity of this banality and transformative potential finds figural expression in Pablo Guardiola’s Jet Travel, at Romer Young Gallery. Guardiola has taken off from the etymological ground of the “tropaic”—Greek trepho or “to turn”—and literalized that movement in his framing of mostly appropriated imagery of mostly “other places.” In A Note for the Future (2011), the landscape is doubled. The city’s buildings meet the ground in the middle of the image. Below, another cityscape points toward the bottom of the frame. The city is thus turned upside down, but preserved in mirrored and fugal relation to a conventionally pictured and expected image of the skyline. The uncanny duplication of the monolithic buildings recalls the map of Dante’s journey from inferno to paradise with its allegorical subterranean geography and complementary realm above.

Turns mark nearly every work in the exhibition, including two large prints that are not appropriated, but presumably have been taken by Guardiola himself. The needle of the compass in Signal (2011) is built to “turn” with the holder, and yet what it “signals” is an objective relation of that subject to magnetic pull/poles. In the astonishing print “What do you think about space and time travel?” “But I thought all travels were done in time and space” (2011), Guardiola has performed a translation of spatial signifiers into temporal signifiers. Isolated stylized emblems of urban domiciles are re-presented as the names of years from the 1900s and 2000s, recuperating their anonymity by depriving them of locative significance.

In Salitre (2011), a picture of a crowded and festive resort swimming pool is literally turned 180 degrees. The pyramids 

A Note For The Future, 2011; C-print, 30 x 22.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco.

“What do you think about space and time travel?” “But I thought all travels were done in time and space,” 2011; C-print, 30 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco.

in Sand.Castles. (2011) have been transformed by virtue of distance and scale from monuments to toys. I wish to communicate with you, K/Kilo (2011) portrays a beach city of undoubtedly coveted high-rise condos; the image is bisected so that the left side appears through an infrared yellow, and the right side through sky or sea blue—as if the sunset itself is turned on its side, engulfing the city from that perverse vantage. In the diptych Sea Is History. Giant Waves (2011), adjacent images show the lovely placidity of buildings next to water on one hand, and on the other, the devastation that’s always an inherent potentiality in human habitations built next to unstable and rapidly disastrous waters. Seeing these juxtaposed images just after the massive loss of life effected by the tsunami waters in Japan provoked a perhaps unintended contingent drama to the encounter.

To some extent, the photographs aspire to the ahistorical. That is, they recapitulate photography’s paradoxical wager of establishing an enduring image of the quintessentially ephemeral: here, cities and landscapes of other places. And yet the long tradition of geography as a genre is fundamental to Guardiola’s sense of what and how these images provoke. The aluminum portfolio Marco Polo (2011) states this, asserting that Marco Polo is the anti-Ulysses. Odyssey is a teleological journey in which every region is a mere obstacle to Odysseus’ ultimate return to Ithaca; Marco Polo, on the other hand, continually moves from one place to another, obsessively repeating an abdication of the home in favor of new experience.

Jet Travel seems allergic to even this post hoc didacticism of Polo’s descriptive discourse. You know how Herodotos is always like, “The Parthians like to eat stewed turtles and their wives pick nuts and stir them into the stew,” or whatever; scribe-travelers like Herodotos return home with a marvelous story to recount; they try to instruct their fellows and sisters who might one day travel to such lands. But these texts also traditionally instate the author as the heroic traveler. In this sense, Guardiola’s comparison of Polo to Ulysses, even in the negative, is extraordinarily acute: his travels are epic.

Yet, in Jet Travel, the protagonist doesn’t appear and, even if she did, she wouldn’t have actually gone anywhere. There is no impulse for a pedagogical geography beyond the insistence on perpetual turning: a serial interrogation of this tradition’s never-objective mode of inquiry. However, there is a conventional exhortation to viewers—an attention to renewal, detournement. Remember how Derrida describes the gallery as a labyrinth that includes in itself its own exits? Guardiola’s labyrinth figures instead as the jet plane with its LED emergency exits. The stability of imagery threatening to emblematize a whole place is highly unstable; there is no telling what will emerge. The specter of the flâneur is one possible figure not cited here, but extractable; the armed, insane colonist another. Viewers may embark on psychogeographical explorations of their own. With fits and starts. Expect turbulence.

Jet Travel is on view at Romer Young Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 9, 2011.

In this year’s February issue of Artforum, which features a lengthy section dedicated to the topic of collaboration, Tom Hollert writes, “Collectives and collaboratives are still assumed to be intrinsically liberating. Their emancipatory dimension is linked with the elevation of co-labor, of working in teams rather than lingering in the solitude of the studio.”¹ This intrinsic liberation may be the reason for the continued practice of collaborators leonardogillesfleur, a husband and wife team comprising Leonardo Giacomuzzo and Gilles-fleur Boutry. Yet, they take this straightforward logic on a roundabout, even paradoxical, route toward emancipation in their exhibition SNOWBALL.

Staged front and center at the entrance of Catharine Clark Gallery is SNOWBALL’s headlining act, FITO (2006-2010). Like most self-aggrandizing, fashionably late performers, this showstopper initially refuses to play its part. Part three of an ongoing series titled Irreconcilable Differences, FITO comprises two lipstick-red 1976 Fiat 600s seamlessly fused into one double-headed, obstinately opposing entity. This “car” doesn’t appear to be escaping or liberating anyone or anything anytime soon.

In California, irreconcilable differences are grounds for a no-fault divorce. Irreconcilable Differences, on the other hand, has no chance of such a split. A tandem bike stuck in static opposition, an earlier work from the Irreconcilable series included in the exhibition, echoes this frustrating tension. Bound by the difficult, resilient materials of metal, rubber, plastic, and glass otherwise built to withstand the brunt of a journey, Irreconcilable’s “vehicles” appear capable and ready, yet are forever fixed—stripped of their function and relegated to form.

These trajectory-failed works bring to light an ongoing struggle integral to any work of creative collaboration, where differences, stalemates, and antagonisms are unavoidable. But these failures can also contain productive potentials. As leonardogillesfleur demonstrates, the automobile, with its history of collaboration from assembly lines to backseat drivers, illustrates the productive potential often found in collaboration’s failures and entangled disagreements—especially at the level of the crash.

Literally two forces coming together, the crash can be seen as the apotheosis of collaboration, a place where interstitial, erotic spaces open up through material destruction. J.G. Ballard’s Crash posits this collusive act as opening “possibilities of a new logic created by these multiplying artifacts, the codes of a new marriage between sensation and possibility.”² Leonardogillesfleur’s video installation In To You (2011) registers this “new sexuality” through the rendering of three fictionalized car crashes in varying degrees of slow motion.³ In one, a model car is driven vertically into the roof of another and begins to resemble the sensuously strained contour of a ballerina’s foot en pointe. The ensuing, achingly slow, contorted collapse of one car into the other carries with it a graduating sexual tension as, little by little, the metal bends and

In To You Phase 1, 2011 (video still); 3-channel video installation; edition of 3 + 2 AP; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Self-Reflection, 2010; installation view; resin, glass, polyurethane, discarded domestic Argentinean white goose feathers; approx. 63 x 72 x 34 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

snaps, the glass cracks and pops. In a striking and erotic experience, In To You creates frisson through the repetition of constantly shifting parts, in which every stress break releases a charged potential found in an otherwise destructive and finalizing act.

This opening of a stalled or closed space resonates further in the work Self-Reflection (2010). In this mixed-media installation, a faux-taxidermied puma has recently escaped from its shipping crate (Self); it appears to be locked in a fixed stare with a domed surveillance mirror wrapped in neon lettering (Reflection). Self-Reflection marks the threat of another self-enclosed, static system; another stalled object. Yet, the bubbled, slightly pockmarked surface of the mirror in Reflection distorts any attempts at a literal reading of its reflected images; everything is skewed and transfigured in its reflective wake—an incompatibility reinforced by the neon sentences that alternate around the perimeter of Reflection: “I refuse to be what you want me to be; you refuse to be what I want you to be.”

The linguistic play of “I refuse” and “You refuse” (my italics) points to Self-Reflection as objects to be discarded or rejected, suggesting they be read as something else altogether. This rhetorical roundabout indicates a new way of looking, beyond repetitive reflection. The fact that the puma is faux-taxidermied and shipped in a box plastered with “fragile” stickers points to and pokes fun at the puma’s material inauthenticity. When situated alongside the other works in SNOWBALL, it’s easy to imagine Self’s contents as that other exotic import that ships in a special container: the Puma sports car of the 1970s, which shares similar hybridized (Italian-South American) origins with the Fiat. The mirror of Reflection, then, in the way in which leonardogillesfleur use the automobile, resembles the over-hyped and supplemental bubble mirror typically placed within rearview mirrors to reveal blind spots.

Such an unforeseen vision is what separates terminal crashes from emancipating ones. Despite their literal entrapment in time, space, and to each other, leonardogillesfleur’s works in SNOWBALL are able to move and transition conceptually by means of linguistic maneuvering and material tens(e)ions found in acts of collision and opposition. In terms of collaboration and its discontents, a little emphasis can go a long way, and subtle shifts—like Fiat to FITO—make all the difference for a collaboration that liberates rather than constrains.

SNOWBALL is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 2, 2011.

________
NOTES:
1. Tom Hollert, “Joint Ventures,” Artforum XLIX, no. 6 (2011).
2. J.G. Ballard, Crash (New York: Picador, 1973), 106.
3. Ibid, 119.

As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is republishing Michael Tomeo's article “Knots Landing: Lynda Benglis at the New Museum,” which you can also read here at Daily Serving.

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Lynda Benglis is a fearless artist. She added a much-needed sense of humor to first-generation feminism and imbued late 1960s/early ‘70s Post-Minimal sculpture with an even more needed sense of color. But a lot of her work is kind of awful. Her legendary status as an artist who went toe-to-toe with the biggest male egos in the New York art world is well deserved, and I’ll take her slumping blobs of polyurethane as examples of entropy in sculpture over Robert Smithson’s lame mirrors stuck in dirt any day. The nearly uniform praise for her current retrospective at the New Museum, however, feels like it’s based more on her historical status than on the work itself.

The Fallen Paintings (Benglis’ signature poured latex floor pieces) are by far the best in show. Slabs of poured paint yield to gravity as they diffuse Minimalism’s rigid structure with Color Field’s floating orbs and Jackson Pollock’s subconscious process. These works call to mind a sophisticated sense of order, like Merce Cunningham’s low center of gravity choreography. However, the chicken wire, glitter, paint and plaster construction of the wall pieces, which was probably shocking in the ‘70s, just seems amateurish now. They don’t extend the properties of the material to anywhere near the same degree that the floor works do. They look good in reproduction, but in person they disappoint.

Sparkle Knot V, 1972.

Centerfold by Lynda Benglis published in Artforum magazine, 1974.

As you move forward chronologically, Benglis’ work begins to reference the body in increasingly flat-footed ways and her forms get more cheesily symbolic. The Peacock series from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s consists of vaguely vaginal decorated fans hung on the wall. Chiron, from 2009, is a big glowing pink egg. Even Phantom, five dramatic glow-in-the-dark dripping mountains (shown here for the first time since 1971) give off a distinct Led Zeppelin “Houses of the Holy” vibe. They’re cool in a geeky sort of way, but by the time I got to Primary Structures, (Paula’s Props), a room-sized installation of blue velvet drapes, some fake trees and Greek columns, I began to question Benglis’ taste for real.

Where she completely kicks ass, however, is in her randy sense of iconic self-promotion. The photos of her at work on her floor pieces are classics, and the notorious advertisement from the November 1974 issue of Artforum, where she appears nude with slicked back hair holding a dildo between her legs, is still shockingly strong. Even though it’s been written about ad nauseum and reproduced a zillion times, it still packs a punch in person. Shot from below, Benglis appears as monumental as Michelangelo’s David and her image turns about 2,000 years of male-dominated Western Art History on its head. Set against a stark black rectangle, it’s as if Benglis is literally turning the page on Minimalism’s colorless form and gender hierarchy in the most in-your-face way possible. So what if feminists at the time hated it—Benglis was likely the first female artist to consciously construct a heroic artistic persona, and that took bigger balls than just throwing a vaginal reference or two into her work.

If many of her wall sculptures don’t quite live up to her outsized rep, there are videos and Polaroids on display that certainly do. The Amazing Bow-Wow, 1976, is an uncannily watchable short film about a hermaphroditic human-sized dog that enters into a fateful love triangle full of jealousy and lust. It’s as unflinchingly gutsy as any Paul McCarthy, but with way more heart. Displayed next to the video is a series of Polaroids called Secrets that combine pornish images of Benglis and Robert Morris with close-ups of flowers. Here, the collusion between nature, sex and overlapping bodies is as palpable as it is in the floor sculptures. Rarely exhibited, the photos’ old wooden frames have the vibe of pre-boutique-era SoHo. Nostalgic art relic nerds, get ready.

All of Benglis’ work might not stand the test of time. She’s like a classic rock band that put out three or four great albums with timeless cover art. Like a lot of those bands, Benglis synthed out in the ‘80s and never quite recovered, but it doesn’t matter. The lesson here is that she full-on embraced failure in her work, through both an entropic use of materials and by taking risks that few artists today would even consider. For all of her posturing and dildo-ing around, she still feels human and extremely relatable, and she’s more than paid her dues. Every New Yorker knows that she’s one of ours, so if she makes criminally bad art, it’s cool. We just look the other way.

Curtain Call is a precise, evocative exhibition of six sculptures that emphasize physical instability and the mutability of function and form. In this solo exhibition at DODGEgallery, Robert de Saint Phalle explores the nature and physics of props—how to prop up materials, how gallery elements become aesthetic props, and how stage elements become gallery works.

The works vary greatly in scale and materials, yet share the incorporation of gallery infrastructure. Here, the functional is propped up by the seemingly aesthetic. In Dress Rehearsal (2010), interlocked steel legs keep a large sheet of black-painted glass looming over a low gray bench. Typically, cushioned seating like this invites viewers to contemplate particularly large and abstract paintings or videos, but Saint Phalle’s glass threatens to flatten those ensconced. Additionally, two elements in Dress Rehearsal add an illusionistic puzzle. A perfectly polished, amorphously shaped hole has been cut from the glass. A piece of fabric draped over the top of the glass bears a printed image of vibrant patterns seen through the hole and projected onto the fabric. It is a print of a photo of a projection. Subtle gradations of light and shadow are depicted in the same exact places as the fabric’s creases. Parsing the real shadows from the printed ones is a perceptual workout. Imagining the studio setups that resulted in the fabric print is a recursive exercise for the imagination—a rabbit hole.

Quarry (2009) consists of a rusted drum barrel with a slick sludge form inside. In contrast to the deteriorating barrel, crisp, sharp vectors define the sludge shape. Appropriately and ironically, this representation of toxic pollution is made visually seductive with automotive paints. Glossy, iridescent taupe paint transitions to sickly desert rose. It sits askew atop a pedestal that appears to be sliced at an angle, perilously narrow on the side beneath the barrel. It is a detail that would be possible to overlook if the nuance of Saint Phalle’s work didn’t beg close inspection.

Le Nana, 2011; installation view; 18 x 11 x 15 in. Courtesy of the Artist and DODGEgallery, New York.

Dress Rehearsal, 2010; installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; 8 x 8 x 8 feet. Courtesy of the Artist, Charles Mayer, and DODGEgallery, New York.

Untitled (Chameleon) (2008) contrasts functional, neutrally colored objects against eye-catching painted surfaces. Two white steel stands lean together, bridged by a freeform fiberglass sheet. The sheet is painted in iridescent color-shifting hues reminiscent of custom cars, green monsters, and Los Angeles artist Liz Larner’s massive fiberglass sculpture, Untitled 2001 (2003). While this piece is the most visually interesting element of the sculpture, Saint Phalle makes it structurally significant. In contrast, a spotlight with barn doors is clamped to the upper stand. Cordless, it is neutered of its capacity to light artworks, instead becoming “merely” aesthetic. The beady texture of the bulb’s heavy lens catches incidental light from the gallery’s halogens.

In a corner, a blue plastic shopping bag imperceptibly quivers, as if it blew in from the street and magically escaped detection by vigilant gallery-sitters. When visitors peer inside the bag’s narrow opening, they see what looks like muddy water—a familiar sight this La Niña winter. However, the puddle in this bag is cast with almost cartoonish rounded edges, and the dingy tint is graced with optical reflectivity. Le Nana (2011) is, in fact, made with cast crystal, reflecting those who gaze upon it. It forces viewers to reenact the Narcissus myth, in dirty, high-touch New York style.

Installed in the restroom, Reverend (2009) is a wooden dolly with red neon mounted on its underside. It is a one-liner about minimalist sculpture, conflating art’s precious cargo with galleries’ mundane equipment. Though it sits on the ground as if awaiting a crate, it is leashed by an electrical lead, which curtails the zone of transport to a few centimeters. Its placement in the water closet, which too commonly functions as extra storage space in new galleries, is a knowing gesture.

Lean To (2007) is a sheath of fake rock tacked to lumber framing. The assembly is tipped at an angle, but not on the wooden supports. It rests on a fluorescent tube, which illuminates the craggy trowel marks of the back of the fake rock. The size, shape, and structure reminded me of a survival shelter, though only in Saint Phalle’s inversed reality would one find shelter from nature beneath a fake rock, with a support beam of fluorescent light.

Such wordplay brings levity to the show. The exhibition begins with Dress Rehearsal, the largest, most physically menacing work with the greatest conceptual subfloors. In many sculptures, the obvious familiarity of materials and subtle form/function shifts require the viewer’s investment of time and attention. The simpler pieces more readily offer humor and absurdity. With their inclusion, the exhibition expresses instability at many scales and forms, from the linguistic to physical. Among these threats of collapse, Saint Phalle’s work encourages viewers to consider where—among familiar, expressive, or structural materials—artistry resides, highlighting the implications of combination and assembly.

Curtain Call is on view at DODGEgallery, in New York, through March 27, 2011.

The depth of meaning embedded in Song Dong’s multimedia installation Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well, currently on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), seems infinite, like the vast ocean that he and his family traversed en route to San Francisco. Song was born and raised in Beijing, where he continues to live and work as a leading figure in Chinese contemporary art, and the complex sociopolitical, economic, and environmental histories of modern China are undeniably present in this exhibition. However, Song’s increasingly global avant-garde practice transcends the conceptual and physical boundaries of contemporary art and geopolitics. As expressed by the title, it is the notion of family that carries the greatest significance—a family that he has purposefully situated in a broader, more fluid, and fleeting reality. In his words, “Art is my hobby. Life is my true creation.”

The monumental assemblage Waste Not (2005–2011), now in YBCA’s main gallery, first appeared in Beijing six years ago. The contents have since been reinstalled in Korea, Germany, England, and Canada, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, each time reconfigured and thereby revitalized into a new site- and time-specific composition. YBCA’s gallery is brimming with over ten thousand well-used objects: cardboard boxes, televisions, couches, toys, TVs, leather bags, shoes, keys, and other ephemera form a cumulative living landscape of memory. Song conceived of the installation with his (now deceased) mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, in response to his father’s death, recuperating and remembering his life by ritually rearranging their beloved joint possessions. Zhao and Song processed their grief by laboring over the installations—unpacking, touching, and placing the items in art galleries around the world. At its core, Waste Not is a conduit for familial love and stewardship.

It might be tempting for eco-conscious Bay Area residents to interpret Waste Not as environmental art, demonstrating the green ideals of reduce, reuse, and recycle that have emerged after decades of indulgent capitalist consumerism. My own aversion to plastics and nostalgia for natural materials, such as the mysteriously preserved mango pits, were indeed heightened when immersed in this installation.

The poetic power of Waste Not is its ability to challenge these inculcated personal values and reveal a different perspective specific to Song’s life experience. His mother, Zhao, endured decades of rigid Communist rationing wherein basic goods like fabric and shoes were rendered scarce by a government intent on controlling equality and fashion. She managed her family’s well-being by celebrating the potential longevity, rather than disposability, of plastics and other received goods. She saved and cared for every item on display.

Waste Not, 2005–2011; installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; mixed media; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photo: Justin Korn.

My Daughter is My Four Seasons (detail), 2010; four-channel video installation with timber frames; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand.

Song’s early training as a painter and fascination with light are evident in the formal aesthetics of Waste Not, as well as in his other experimental videos and photographs. He eloquently harnesses the visual language of colors, forms, frames, mirrors, and projections as representational mechanisms for casting an illusionary pall over what is commonly perceived to be a factual material reality. No matter the subject of any particular artwork, it is this combined sensibility that underlies Song’s reputation as a premiere contemporary artist, further merited by his unique approach to life as art.

The evolution of Song’s gently interventionist work is marked by two other installations in YBCA’s adjoining galleries: Touching My Father (1997–2011) and My Daughter is My Four Seasons (2010). Touching My Father includes one single-channel video, two digital prints, and a videotape sealed and preserved inside an acrylic box. These various formats document an experimental artwork wherein Song projects a video of his hands onto his father’s body. His projected hands bend over the flesh of his father as a meditation on the permeability of figurative light on human skin. Through this exceedingly personal work, Song attempts to breach the Chinese cultural mandate to maintain physical and psychological distance between sons and fathers. 

Song created My Daughter is My Four Seasons while in residence at New Zealand’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with his wife, Yin Xiuzhen, and their daughter, ErRui.¹ In this work, four videos capture the essence of classical Chinese landscapes during the four seasons of the year. Each one is saturated in color and framed by a circular window cut out from a serenely white, wall-mounted box, a minimalist interpretation of traditional Chinese garden architecture. Song’s daughter unexpectedly appears at timed intervals in the video loops; her presence establishes the miniature scale and uncanny artifice of the four seasonal scenes, which are actually made of food.

In one, she sleeps peacefully behind a stone-like pile of green bell peppers and pears; in another, she blows through a straw to make ripples in the aquamarine water surrounding hills of fried chicken; and, in my personal favorite, she uses chopsticks to select a piece of pink salmon layered like sedimentary rock and sprinkled with parsley trees. In the critical moment of consumption, Song resists the art-as-commodity paradigm, instead strengthening a familial bond with his daughter, a budding artist who is learning from her father that life itself can be playful and pliable.

Similar to Waste Not, these installations serve as conceptual portals, combining a painterly aesthetic with reflections on reality to explore the metaphysical relationship between perception and touch. YBCA exhibition curator Betti-Sue Hertz did well to persuade Song to show these living new-media portraits alongside his larger assemblage of material culture. The show presents the Bay Area with a marvelous introduction to his work, his family, and his uniquely personal approach to making globally relevant art from life.²

Song Dong: Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, through June 12, 2011.

________

NOTES:

1. Yin Xiuzhen is also a leading figure in Chinese contemporary art. She has exhibited widely including the 2007 Venice Biennale, 2008 Shanghai Biennale, and last year at MoMA.
2. Paraphrased by Song Dong’s longtime friend and colleague, Wu Hung, during the Scholar’s Roundtable hosted by YBCA on Saturday, February 26, 2011.

Route 2: Undisclosed Destination investigates the idea of a West Coast aesthetic as both a decoy and an impresario. In a truly complex approach by a new curator, location is a curatorial device that situates, and sometimes subsumes, the work within its site-specific grasp. Though a collector’s taste may sometimes limit exhibition options, curator Sharon Lerner employs ArtNow International Foundation’s 101 Collection of West Coast art with a nimble sleight of hand to delimit the very conceit of American Westernness.

Visitors have two options for navigating the exhibition: a left route, which I’ll call Manifest Destiny, and a right route, which I’ll haphazardly dub Re-Cut Contexts. Along the journey to the left, ideas of American expansion are quickly derailed by Gareth Moore’s Map (from Uncertain Pilgrimage) (2006–2009). Unfolded and completely blank, it evokes the anticipation or dread of an uncharted journey. The road leads to the central piece: Elisheva Biernoff’s They Were Here (2009), a generically painted sixteen-foot-long mural of an island paradise with white sand beaches and waterfalls; among the hidden details are exploding volcanoes, extinct plant life, dead birds, and shipwrecks. Upon peering through the scenic vista binoculars provided at a slight distance from the mural, the entire island disappears into a stereoscopic view of the surrounding ocean. Biernoff has labeled the binoculars a “time machine,” perhaps to suggest, like Moore’s Map, the double bind of imagining both an unrealized utopia and dystopia in two future potentialities.

More poignantly, Biernoff’s Last Postcards: Bas Jan Ader, Everett Ruess, and Percy Fawcett (2009) conjures the final correspondences of artists/explorers who have set off on journeys into the unknown—and who have eventually disappeared forever. The correspondence is at once a romantic portrayal of ventures into the unfamiliar and a sad portrait of imminent loss. From this vantage point, landscapes function as both idylls and psychological deathtraps; the allure of the American West, permanently enmeshed in the power play of expansion and idealism, blurs into a dangerous mirage.

Much of the back gallery of Undisclosed Destination absents the artist-as-narrator, a position that currently commands a considerable place in contemporary art. Instead, this transitory space is meta-critical, verging on total subjective annihilation. Jordan Kantor’s paintings and 16mm film record the phenomena of lens flare, an effect caused by the refraction of light through a camera lens. It’s easy to simultaneously romanticize and rebuke this effect, since it’s simply lovely to view, but it also impedes the intended image. Mungo Thomson’s The White Album (2008), one hundred issues of Artforum, Xeroxed in black-and-white and divested

Geoffrey Farmer. Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger, 2009; mixed media; 89 x 118 x 118 in. Courtesy of Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver.

Elisheva Biernoff. They Were Here, 2009; painting: acrylic latex on plywood; 8 x 16 ft; binoculare: acrylic latex on MDF and plywood; 67 x 24 x 24 in. Courtesy of ProArts, Oakland.

of articles and features, is enthralling as an historical object, documenting the market’s rapid usurpation of discourse during the 1970s. As a permutation of Western abstraction, these works negotiate the ghostly specter of legibility, mediating images through cerebral critiques rather than overt representation.

Riffing on these themes of overriding content, Will Rogan erases images of magicians from prominence in the pages of Magic Unity Might (M-U-M), the Society of American Magicians’ magazine. Disappearing these illusionists suggests their already tenuous presence and, accordingly, the powerful presence of the artist himself. The premise of the show, the “undisclosed destination,” compels viewers to understand these back gallery pieces as non-specific works, where context has been removed or obscured. Yet, we can also think of them as casual encounters, indeterminate and effaced by their own lusty efforts to remain aloof. And certainly, between Hollywood and the Silicon Valley, the West is ripe with such chicanery.

The last space, Re-Cut Contexts (my title), acts as the show’s impresario; Ferus Gallery scenesters Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz/Nancy Reddin embody the aspirations of a younger generation wishing to depict West Coast counterculture. Wedding everyday realities with a spiritual symbolism, these Ferus artists were once considered pornographers and provocateurs. Primarily these works oppose the work in the previous gallery by revealing, instead of obscuring, representational contexts. William E. Jones’ Killed (2009) is a cinematic dance choreographed by the work of Roy Emerson Stryker, director of the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) documentary photography project during the Great Depression. Championing seminal photos by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn, at the same time Stryker censored their unacceptable negatives with a hole-punch, a “kill shot.” Jones reevaluates the voids in these rejected negatives, which are animated and dance across the screen; in play with the offending content, the photographs ironically become a newly effective archive. Alongside Geoffrey Farmer’s Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger (2009), this kineticism reanimates lost histories that still pose a challenge to “acceptable” representations.

Route 2: Undisclosed Destination joins together conventions that contrive the West Coast as a site for dystopian/utopian exploration, abstracting origins, and subverting the status quo. Divulging the theatricality of this mythology, what is collected here as West Coast art is revealed to be a universal journey through idealism and ensuing regret, cool dismissal rebutted by fierce participation. These dialectics don’t really distinguish East from West, but their oppositional impulses rub closely enough to show an incendiary effect.

Route 2: Undisclosed Destination is on view at Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at CCA through April 9, 2011.

SF Camerawork’s As Yet Untitled: Artists and Writers in Collaboration sets out with the intriguing proposition of exploring the relationship between photography and writing. It’s an understandably vague premise—Which relationship? What manner of writing?—but the exhibition posits itself as “an experimental proposition,” and as with any experiment, we might simply judge whether the results support or ultimately give question to the stated hypothesis.¹

Group shows can be, and unfortunately usually are, uneven affairs. This is especially true when the governing rubric is overly ambitious, or as with As Yet Untitled, slightly unclear. Two ongoing “residencies” in SF Camerawork’s first gallery act as a synecdoche for the overall exhibition. The first, indicated by chairs and a table haphazardly covered with paper, pens, notes, and select photography books, is the project of Bay Area–based Nonsite Collective, an interdisciplinary group of merry pranksters who re-imagine traditional notions of pedagogy and common space. During the current exhibition, they periodically meet to discuss and parse abstract ideas like “access,” “excess,” and “good(s),” scribbling airy non sequiturs—including some in Korean and what I took to be Russian—on pieces of paper they then post to the wall below placards for each concept. I couldn’t quite tease out the purpose in the exercise, and since no Nonsite cadre was present the day I visited, it was unclear whether the entire project was intended for the paying gallery visitor, or simply for the benefit of Nonsite’s knowing members.

The second residency, located just behind Nonsite’s detritus-strewn table, is Colter Jacobsen’s Allone Co., subsidiary to Portland-based Publication Studio, a sort of mobile bookbinding and print-on-demand operation that acts as its own project within the exhibition and also produces a takeaway book for one of the show’s artist/writer collaborations. Jacobsen was there the day I visited, and he was busy at work cutting and binding manuscripts—his own, those for friends, and a handful of impromptu flip-books he assembled from leftover scraps. We talked about the minimal necessities of running such an operation—essentially a copy machine, bookbinder, and a heavy-duty paper cutter—and the $3000 or so needed to procure them. He showed me some of Publication Studio’s simple and delicate work, and we talked about the merits and pratfalls of the entire exhibition. The very fact of his being there provided Allone Co.’s residency with all the effective give-and-take that Nonsite’s lacked, and this overall lopsidedness extended to the five collaborative works in the show’s second gallery.

David Horvitz and Zach Houston. Volume South, 2011. Courtesy of the Artists and SF Camerawork, San Francisco.

Anne Colvin and Stuart Krimko. The Forged Coupon, 2011. Produced by Publication Studios, Berkeley. Courtesy of the Artists and SF Camerawork, San Francisco.

The artist Anne Colvin and poet Stuart Krimko offer a simple takeaway chapbook, produced and constantly refreshed by Jacobsen’s printing studio. Entitled The Forged Coupon (2011), their work is named after a Tolstoy novella that French director Robert Bresson is said to have used as inspiration for his last film, L’Argent (1983). Utilizing images both literal and figurative from this movie and Lancelot du Lac (1974), another late Bresson film, Colvin and Krimko attempt to explore the subtle aesthetic and self-generative ideas of the director’s work. The result is a twenty-four-quatrain poem by Krimko that utilizes images from the movies, followed by a series of Colvin’s close-cropped black-and-white stills from the same films. While Bresson’s cinematic imagery unites the two, the sum of their parts does frustratingly little to address the filmmaker or any notions of filmic language and narrative experimentation.

Similarly underwhelming, and confusingly so, is the collaboration between artist David Horvitz and poet Zach Houston. Horvitz traveled the entire California coast, stopping to snap photos of picturesque sunsets, serene beaches, and towering dunes. The photos, not especially noteworthy and perhaps not meant to be, are attached with Houston’s typewritten and Beat-like ramblings. The entire presentation is off the cuff and without method, and beyond the literal connection of a person responding to an image through words, I couldn’t understand why it was included. Happily, in an adjacent work, Horvitz uses photos from the same road trip to create a humorous institutional critique of Wikipedia and user-generated content. The artist went to the encyclopedia pages of a number of the coastal towns he visited and uploaded contemplative Caspar David Friedrich–like photos of himself standing on the beach, calling into question the authority of any contributor’s version of objective fact. It’s a simple, thoughtful, and effective work.

Across the gallery is a bizarre and overly Photoshopped triptych by Mexican performance artist and MacArthur genius award winner Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Depicting himself and two members of the La Pocha Nostra troupe semi-nude and mysteriously ungrounded, the portraits are also reproduced as takeaway postcards coupled with Gómez-Peña’s stern yet dubious aphorisms about art and politics.

For a show predicated on exploring a relationship, however unspecified, between writing and photography, the most troubling aspect of As Yet Untitled is that so little of the writing or photography is actually evocative of any such relationship. Instead, the show presents a simple call-and-response, in which one medium responds to another in only the most basic give-and-take. Truly intriguing artistic experiments are so much more amorphous than that, and within contemporary art, they can be found now more than ever. The conceptual hijinks of Sol Lewitt or Joseph Kosuth, and even the fiction and poetry of Donald Barthelme and Christan Bök, respectively, speak to the kind of weird and adventurous invention that is implied by any interdisciplinary art. The “experimental proposition” that SF Camerawork seeks to create with As Yet Untitled instead suggests a set of hypotheses defined too narrowly.

As Yet Untitled: Artists and Writers in Collaboration is on view at SF Camerawork, in San Francisco, through April 23, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. http://www.sfcamerawork.org/exhibitions/exhibitions_Spring2011_AsYetUntitled_text.php

I find myself having a similar response to all the Museum of Craft and Folk Art (MOCFA) exhibitions that I have seen recently. It’s a response that Kenneth Baker often expresses in reviews of thematic shows he enjoys, namely that the exhibition seems like a sketch or proposal for something larger. Undoubtedly it’s another way of saying, “I would have liked to see more"; this is usually the thought with which I exit MOCFA.

It is bold, even admirable, that this venue has ambitions beyond its size. But these ambitions have to contend with the limitations of MOCFA’s footprint when the museum attempts surveys of larger bodies of work or thematic shows. E is for Everyone tantalizes with too few examples of Sister Mary Corita’s extraordinary output. The exhibition presents a selection of key works from the late 1960s, perhaps her most fertile studio period, together with two exemplars from the early and late ’70s, respectively. Although they total less than twenty, the exuberantly color-rich, text-driven prints are arguably compelling enough to hold the space.

But the show doesn’t stop there. It also includes an homage to her “close personal and working relationship” with Charles and Ray Eames, a wall-painted mock up by local artist Jenifer Wofford of Corita’s rules for students and teachers of the Immaculate Heart College Art Department, plus two films, one of which is Aaron Rose’s 2009 documentary, Become a Microscope. Not least, the products of the museum’s CreateRelate collaboration with Creative Growth Art Center artists—a limited edition of painted boxes using Sister Corita’s techniques and images—are also on view. Their presence in the gift shop is complemented by Corita-related ephemera and literature. The whole adds up to a museum-standard extravaganza, or at least a proposal for how one should be done.

As the exhibition materials make clear, Corita’s story is remarkable. Born Frances Elizabeth Kent in 1918 in Fort Dodge, Iowa, she grew up in Los Angeles and at the age of eighteen, joined the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, adopting the name Sister Mary Corita. More versed in theory than practice, she finished her MA in Art History at University of Southern California in 1951, the same year she made her first silkscreen print. Developing her technique throughout that decade, Corita largely depicted devotional themes (Bible stories, psalms, etc.), and though none of the results are on view or often reproduced, by all accounts these prints were painterly, figurative, and somewhat saccharine. No surprises there, then.

However, her technique and subject matter radically changed later that same decade as her growing skill and interest in the

One Great Loaf, 1965; serigraph; 17 x 23 in. Collection of Corita Art Center, Courtesy of the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco.

Power Up (A), 1965; serigraph; 28.75 x 35 in. Collection of Corita Art Center, Courtesy of the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco.

medium led her further afield in search of ideas. As the content of her work began to emerge from the cloisters and become rooted in urban reality, it gained criticality and relevance through an increasing alignment with the sociopolitical concerns of the era. For some time a thorn in the side of conservative Catholics, Sister Corita’s mild critiques escalated into activist slogans that (gently) exposed the wrongs of society. In works such as Power Up (A) and One Great Loaf (both from 1965), poverty, racism, war, and particularly the Vietnam conflict are addressed. Not even the Catholic Church’s internal struggles are spared. Blurring the boundaries between art and design, aesthetics and politics, her works far decentralized authority, returning it to the grasp of the individual or the community and to more humane values.

Throughout the ’60s, the introduction of text in Corita’s work gradually eased out figurative subject matter, and word size and quantity escalated in the prints until the word eventually became the image. In some prints the words burst somewhere beyond the paper’s edge, in others they float on pools of color, interlock, or meet in layered psychedelic palimpsests. The catchy slogans and typography evince a debt to Los Angeles’ media culture, but Sister Corita drew on a much wider array of cultural sources, including ad slogans, signage, poetry, and song lyrics. Clearly a child of the ’60s, Corita viewed wide distribution as a populist and also Christian principle that determined her choice of printmaking as the ultimate democratic form. Her large unnumbered editions were inexpensively priced and complemented by greeting cards, publications, posters, murals, and billboards. Although motivated by art, Corita did not necessarily align herself with any particular aesthetic movement. And while her work has been claimed by both Pop and feminist art trajectories, I’m not sure that it requires categorization.

The exhibition includes two pieces from the ’70s. Sadly, the works from this period lack the criticality and formal experimentation that characterized Corita’s earlier efforts, evoking instead Picasso’s cheesier later prints (think Hands with flowers [1958]). According to Julie Ault’s excellent essay in Come Alive: The Spirited Art of Sister Corita (London: Four Corners Books, 2007), these later works disappoint with their “platitudes and splashes of color.” Perhaps the activist had burned out and the struggle was over. Certainly it must have been an effort to undertake her own radical move and leave the order in 1968 to devote herself more explicitly to her art. After relocating to Boston, where she remained until her death in 1986, Corita worked most often on large-scale commissioned projects for organizations like Boston Share, the International Walk for Hunger, and Amnesty International. Her work lives on and, in keeping with history’s cyclical rhythms, it seems particularly relevant once more in today’s uneasy, war-torn, economically depressed world.

There are many wonderfully extraordinary facets to Corita’s life and work. As the chair of Immaculate Heart College’s art department, she revolutionized the instruction of art and type design. Cultural luminaries such as John Cage, Alfred Hitchcock, Buckminster Fuller, and Charles and Ray Eames co-taught her classes. Their collaborations as well as her popular community events and temporary exhibitions connected her to large audiences and made her a celebrity in her own right. Happily, the show highlights quite a few aspects of Corita’s legacy, despite being unable to fully explore them. After all, a largely self-taught activist art-making nun is a more or less unique entity in the (art) world, and as this exhibition’s title reminds us, should be celebrated as such.

E is for Everyone: Celebrating Sister Corita is on view at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, in San Francisco, through June 5, 2011.

A friend teased me not long ago about my critical writing being based on a propensity for habitual list-making. He must’ve been right, because here we go again: who are the top five unknown treasures of the Bay Area art world? That is, who are the top artists who live here and do amazing work that is supported nationally or even internationally, but who are essentially unknown here or, if known, are not widely known to live here?

Here’s my list: The celebrated children’s book author and artist J. Otto (of Olive the Other Reindeer fame); the painter and former tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy (of Ed Hardy clothing); the constructor of photographs Keith Cottingham (who has shown at Ronald Feldman, in New York, for over a decade); the public artist Ned Kahn (MacArthur genius award winner, best known locally for his tornado machine at the Exploratorium); and Chris Taggart, longtime resident of Berkeley, now exhibiting his first Bay Area solo show after more than a decade of representation by ACE Gallery, in Los Angeles.

One definition of leap is to take an action without knowing what the outcome will be; Taggart is a sculptor of leaping imagination. He begins his enormously labor-intensive projects without certainty where the rules he makes up will ultimately take him. Bananawar, which he began working on in 2008 and completed in 2011, is the tour de force in this show, a horizontal portrait of a jellyfish etched into dyed aluminum, ten feet long. The artist invented a kind of circular drill bit that, in combination with his weight leaning into it, makes perfect silvery circular cuts. With placement meticulously planned, thousands of these precise loops, in varying sizes from one to eighteen inches, come together to form the image. When realizing what one is looking at, the viewer recognizes that, impossibly, the jellyfish is composed of images of bananas and wrenches, à la Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Another set of works also involves the creation of images through accumulation of circles. In these cases, this is accomplished with colored inks on paper rather than excised metal. There are two works from a series titled Self-Portrait as a Ghost (2004), in which Taggart has searched for pictures of other Chris Taggarts online, downloading and reproducing them. Using a program that abstracts the images into pixels that he translates into perfect circles using a compass, the resulting works come together from a distance as recognizable portraits, while up close they dissolve into hazy ghosts of an image.

AWAY, 2011; installation view, Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco. Courtesy of the Artist and Baer Ridgway Exhibitions.

AWAY, 2011; installation view, Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco. Courtesy of the Artist and Baer Ridgway Exhibitions.

The most dramatic piece in the gallery is titled (The Biggest) Chickenemone.¹ Dated from 2005 to 2009, the enormous tree-like object began with a mold of a chicken’s leg. The artist then had other versions of the original small object made, some as large as a yard or more, some less than half the size of the actual animal’s foot. He then built his tree by creating branches working from larger to smaller. It is at once hilarious and a little nightmarish when the trunk of the tree is most dinosaur-like, scaly and with a scythe-like toenail.

There are two of his woven, mosaic photographs that, using formulas beyond my understanding, expand and abstract images under the headline: “Digital technology overcomes time itself.” One of these photographs is a car’s rear-view mirror that reflects many other cars captured over time, and another is of an artist friend holding many of her works, again over time. Several of his signature 3-D woven objects are on display: a carrot and a turkey leg, re-created in photographs; and a portion of a football remade in cloth and kept inflated by a Rube Goldberg pump. Finally, there is a large and strange work in the downstairs gallery. Two television screens show the rough and scattered drawings of a pair of eyes open, closing, and closed. Throughout the opposite wall and elsewhere in the space, one realizes, are the components of the video image, synthesized by a crude set of clunky mechanical devices and a kinetic convex mirror, and fed into the live video. It is titled Portrait of my Wife (2010) and is remindful of Alan Rath’s many portraits of his wife’s eyes, but in Taggart’s case, it takes place in Toontown.

Taggart is often thought of as the lesser known of a triad that includes two other artists, Tim Hawkinson and Tom Friedman. This is a classic case of simultaneous discovery; I asked Taggart how he felt being cast as Alfred Russel Wallace to their Darwin. His only response was to request that I point out that his work is much less expensive. Such modesty and wit suffuses this exhibition. This is a debut in San Francisco that is long overdue, and greatly welcome.

AWAY is on view at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, in San Francisco, through March 5, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. An earlier version of the piece was shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2004 in a show I curated.

While Trevor Paglen’s Unhuman, at Altman Siegel Gallery, is conceptually and formally strong, it also provokes speculation about how the combination of image and content create space for the viewer to pose questions about the visual or contextual information the artist provides. Paglen’s artistic practice interlaces academic research, journalism, and photography to explore the shadowy world of surveillance and intelligence-gathering by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA). As government agencies search for signs of domestic and international terrorism, Paglen aims his camera at the satellites and unmanned drones that discreetly look back at us. Paglen’s images are frequently fascinating in content and often visually intriguing.  However, at times his photographs fail to move beyond the detailed explanations he gives as context for the viewer and allow for experiential viewing. In addition, sometimes I am left feeling a lack of surprise at how the image and the content unfold together in a way that is greater than the sum of both.

They Watch the Moon (2010) is a mysteriously hazy green photograph of Sugar Grove, an NSA listening station that is part of ECHELON, the classified and automated network of ground stations developed during the Cold War to intercept and relay data communications. Located in the hilly topography of West Virginia, Sugar Grove is in a National Radio Quiet Zone, where radio waves and wireless high-powered transmissions are prohibited, as they interfere with ECHELON. As alluded to in the title, They Watch the Moon, ECHELON operates on “moonbounce,” in which spillover signals escape into space, bounce off the moon, and are detected by satellites when they return to the Earth. There are many conspiratorial and investigative websites about Sugar Grove and ECHELON, with little governmental verification or negation, which may add to the intrigue that surrounds the long-exposure green image. Sugar Grove and the way it operates are incredibly interesting subjects that elicit concerns, whether justified or not, about suspicious behavior on behalf of the U.S. government, or about those who wish to harm national interests. While the image is engaging, it doesn’t present ECHELON, Sugar Grove, moonbounce, and the National Radio Quiet Zone in a way

They Watch the Moon, 2010; C-print, 36 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.

Artifacts (Anasazi Cliff Dwellings, Canyon de Chelly, Spacecraft in Perpetual Geosynchronous Orbit, 35,786 km Above Equator), 2010; one of two C-prints, 40 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.

that moves beyond documentation. Instead, the contextual information provided with the checklist is so fascinating and revelatory that it may overshadow the image.

In his diptych Artifacts (Anasazi Cliff Dwellings, Canyon de Chelly, Spacecraft in Perpetual Geosynchronous Orbit, 35,786 km Above Equator) (2010), Paglen succeeds in creating surprising formal and conceptual ties between two seemingly disparate images. In graphic black-and-white photographs, the linear pattern of striated cliffs and the diagonals created by the long-exposure image of satellites tie the two pictures together. In addition to this formal correlation, the work also speaks of obsolescence and artifact, both in the Anasazi ruins and in a ring of satellites; many of the latter are no longer operational, but remain in perpetual orbit. Through Paglen’s juxtaposition of images, we see the historical time frame, and thus obsolescence, of artifacts left both on the Earth and in space.

The two series of Untitled photographs dedicated to CIA Reaper and Predator drones fuse image and idea such that they feel unified and generative. Compared to the rather weighty content of the rest of the show, these photographs at first seem almost frivolous. Sensuous sky and clouds are minutely dotted with unmanned aircraft used for surveillance in Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries. Like a cloak-and-dagger approach, the expansive fields of billowing and delicate clouds, seemingly benign, act as decoys while the insect-like vehicles belie their true scale and possibly sinister nature. The ambiguity about the subjects of the photographs is revealed by the parenthetical seperation in titles, such as: Untitled (Reaper Drone)(2010) and Untitled (Predator Drone; Indian Springs, NV)(2010). The Untitled photographs have an experiential quality where the images play off their content to pull the viewer back and forth into the photograph in a sequence of looking and scanning that highlights the juncture between art-viewing and surveying.

Much of Paglen’s work clearly expresses the poetics of obsolescence, the expansiveness of space and time, the sinister nature of government surveillance systems, and the reflexivity of photography and looking. However, I also find the content of Paglen’s work so compelling that, at times, the image itself seems almost redundant. I am left wondering, aside from being formally commanding, does the photograph take the idea anywhere that a text couldn’t?  

Unhuman is on view at Altman Siegel Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 2, 2011.

Guerrero Gallery’s current exhibitions of work by Ryan Wallace and Hilary Pecis combine to form a densely hung visual experience, demonstrating how presentation and context can dramatically shape the perception of an artwork. In the main space, Wallace’s intricate series of oil paintings, (((Ω.))), glisten with glitter and specular highlights. Intricate brushstrokes weave into a diffuse central glow in a way that could never be adequately captured in a web-resolution image. It is the kind of visual experience that requires a viewer to invest the time for their perceptions to adapt to the lighting of the space, and to develop an understanding of how the reflections and refractions fuse within the painting’s surface.

This visual reverie is interrupted in the installation by the sheer repetition of nearly identical canvases in tight proximity to each other. The frequency seemingly degrades the potency of each piece, shifting the interpretation of the sequence of paintings to the act of repetition itself. Robbed of this perceptual intimacy, the series as a whole shifts to a veneer of pop decadence, as if the canvases were nightclub promotions. This presentation invokes Richard Meltzer’s infamous review of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Pendulum, which begins: “You you you kinda kinda kinda get get get the the the impression pression pression that that that Creedence Creedence Creedence Clearwater water water keeps keeps keeps doing doing doing the the the same same same thing thing thing over over over and and and over over over again again again.”¹ While Meltzer’s echoing motif can be read as trite or superfluous criticism, it exposes the consequences of critically focusing too narrowly on

Ryan Wallace. (((Ω.))), 2010; oil on canvas; 1 x 47 x 47 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco.

Hilary Pecis. Kingdom, 2011; giclée print; edition 1 of 3; 48 x 36 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco.

a specific artistic strategy, to the detriment of the body of work as a whole. This phenomenon is of course not unique to Wallace, as many galleries and artists have maintained their solvency by effectively creating editions of abstract paintings. Unfortunately, in this presentation, the captivating qualities of the individual works are overwhelmed by their echoes in the space.

In the project space, Pecis’ concurrent exhibition overflows with figurative content. Pecis presents digital photo collages on an expanded scale, constructing hectic landscapes populated by kittens, motorcycles, rainbows, and fighter jets. The delightfully entrancing print Kingdom (2011) features fantasy castles bathed in billowing clouds, exuberantly celebrating with waterslides, kittens, and confetti. While the contents of the photo collages may be rooted in the visual tropes of many common Internet memes, a curious shift of their social value takes place in this series. The large scale of these giclée prints, as well as their expanded resolution and print quality, effectively shift the context away from the disposability of Internet culture onto fresh ground where the compositions can be viewed unburdened. These humorous scenarios can then be read in the continuum of representational landscapes, from the Hudson River school to Thomas Struth.

As the larger printed format shifted the contextual implications of the images, so too does it alter the reception of its craft and materiality. Basic Photoshopping is de rigueur on the Internet, but can be somewhat jarring in prints of this scale. These prints float in between; they are collage composited with a moderate amount of digital craft. The images are neither proudly exposing the rough act of composition nor immersing the viewer with a professional seamlessness, both of which may have been more interesting visual strategies for these whimsical compositions.

Both of these exhibitions share a playful exuberance and a kinetic visuality, but are also bound by the optical scale and density of the audience negotiating the gallery space.

(((Ω.))) and Half Truths and Outright Lies are on view at Guerrero Gallery, in San Francisco, through March 5, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. Meltzer, Richard “Creedence Clearwater Revival Pendulum,” Creem Magazine, October 1970, Volume 2, Number 15.

A low-frequency tone permeates Queens Nails Projects. It’s a dreadful hum: doomy and gloomy, a humid sort of white noise hanging heavy in the atmosphere. Paintings and other objects hang, are propped or stacked, or lean against one another and the white walls. Fist-size holes in these objects allow viewers to see the collages, screen-prints, and hand-markings on canvases partially hidden beneath. In each work and throughout the exhibition, these holes speak to their remnants: positive and negative spaces yearn to be one and the same. Simultaneous presence and absence is the logic that rules in artists Facundo Argañaraz’s and Chris Hood’s exhibition, The Immortal.

Sheets of MDF bisecting chair frames transform into three-dimensional partitions and surfaces on which to mount images. Walls become paintings on which more paintings hang or lean, becoming sculptures in their own right. Paintings become walls with peepholes through to other flat images. Sculptures and stacked paintings become pedestals and, alternately, housing for books. Sotheby’s auction catalogues, science fiction novels, old guidebooks to contemporary art, architecture, and living environments are neatly clustered within the works, like Easter eggs. Every object is both an obvious prop of high art and, conversely, a fetishized version of itself. Their presentation here obfuscates the relationship between an original and its copy by not ascribing priority to either. It unhinges the act of reproduction and pries open the fluid, temporal relationship between production and reception of an art object, an ideology, or a commodity.

The clean lines of the Modernist aesthetic utilized in The Immortal are apparent as a tension between objects as themselves, rather than between objects as stand-in representations. The artists present objects as they are, in most respects only “tastefully” modified; their precious auras remain intact. Together and apart, every object both represents and is a commodity object for sale. The paintings—stewards of the imagery but not ideology of a Modernist agenda—signal a dynamic in which utopian vision mushes up in a regression toward the mean. As the Hammond keyboard (a rare collector’s item) that emits the drone-tone betrays, idleness and catatonia take the place of subversion or ruptures in the status quo. In such a world—one that echoes the world of the Immortals in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story—death is a welcome release from boredom. 

Argañaraz and Hood don’t simply reiterate a style, but consider the way in which style is an arbitrary form that can be taken up to any end—applied to an ideological set, popularized as fashion, or serving as whimsical cultural debris. The Immortal collects and consumes shells of the Modernist model as if to imply that they are empty signifiers—aesthetic strategy is extracted, decontextualized, and fetishized.

Chris Hood. Gelasenheit, 2011; metal, glass, enamel, books, oil, and powdered ink on canvas in nine parts; approximately 72 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Facundo Argañaraz. DCS01371, 2010; acrylic, silkscreen, and transfer on canvas; 68 x 54 in. Chair, 2011; acrylic and transfer on canvas; 60 x 53 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

By the same token, the houseplants that adorn the exhibition are not representations of the ways nature is tamed for decorative ends. The houseplant, here embedded in Table (2010), which transforms a Plexi painting/shipping palette into a coffee table/contemporary sculpture, isn’t a reference; it is the fucked-up-object it always is in the larger world that continues to talk about use and understanding of the natural world. Neither manifestation is truer than the other.

In light of this, a perceived subservience to the culture industry comes into question as the driving force behind The Immortal. In his short story, after which the exhibition takes its title, Borges writes, “Indoctrinated by a practice of centuries, the republic of immortal men had attained the perfection of tolerance and almost that of indifference. They knew that in an infinite period of time, all things happen to all men.”¹ Through use of such a Modernist framework, the gallery becomes a monument, a reminder of an ancient paradigm that is and always was mere stylistic variation in the face of means-ends rationale of late-stage capitalism. On the whole despondent in tone, The Immortal implies that a willful removal of primacy from all objects and images in the space might illustrate the junctures between objecthood, ideology, fetishization, and commodity. The end result, however, is that of a psychic tomb, where such ideas are co-opted—where everything has already eaten itself, vomited itself, and eaten itself again.

The Immortal creates this ouroboros, but the loop reveals a more complicated relationship between Modernist aesthetics and the commodity realm. In this model, the ideas of form, function, aesthetics, and ideology tentatively collapse when considering each object. Such a relationship that displaces any sort of privilege granted to an object siphons the last drops of critical power from the ideology at hand, an idea that’s illustrated succinctly in Untitled (Flowers) (2011). As with Modernist painting tactics, abstracted contours of paint convey flatness, and non-figurative composition draws attention to the convention of painting itself. At the same time, however, this gives way to the decorative, representational, and relevant but inane: cats and flowers. Though rendered in paint rather than thread, and hanging on the wall instead of lying on the floor, Untitled (Flowers) is an almost exact iteration of a pattern printed on a decorative rug for sale at Urban Outfitters.

Though in some ways compelling, visually clever, and potentially conceptually terse, The Immortal raises one question in the wake of the futility illustrated—why use art to make this point? Doing so engages in an artistic trumping game, where the end results are either to render the mode of production dead or to resurrect it; the crux of this game lies in the same boring, calculated, and circular topical discussion of art school rhetoric. By critiquing the problems inherent in the production and reception of art within the bubble of ideological frameworks, Argañaraz and Hood’s strategies, working wittily from the inside out, may not be enough to evoke the concept that such a resistant ideological framework is never separate from the commodity culture that initially produced it. At its logical extreme, The Immortal offers viewers yet another set of readily consumable objects.

The Immortal is on view at Queens Nails Projects, in San Francisco, through February 26, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. Borges, Jorge Luis, “The Immortal,” in Labyrinths, ed. Yates, Donald A. & James E. Irby (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964), 114.

Three women sit in a field dutifully stitching up the bellies of a heap of prone tigers. The cats are large and clumsy loads; they appear no more ferocious than a streak of tiger-shaped beanbags. The real intensity lies behind the knitted brows of the women, whose ruminative psychology seems to spy objects light-years away from their skilled hands and the helpless bodies of such absurd tigers. Tiger Mending (2003) is just one of Amy Cutler’s more than two dozen paintings currently on view in Ruth Claxton / Amy Cutler / Runa Islam at SITE Santa Fe; the title of the show appropriately indicates that this three-woman exhibition is truly three solo shows under one roof. Each artist is given ample space to define her own reality, something Cutler does very well in the dreamy, storybook-like images she has created over the past ten years.

Cutler’s works of gouache on paper are charming, precise in their execution, and full of legible but curious narratives. Her meticulously rendered scenarios contrast graphically with large areas of the white paper. Leaving so much untouched—a choice that is simultaneously referential to the illustrational conventions of Western fairy tales and Far Eastern scroll paintings—lends an ethereal quality to her sparsely contextualized paintings. Her protagonists are groups of women, who often represent a collective Euro-American female identity hamstrung by tradition, conformity, duty, rivalries with other women, and unspecified symbolic burdens.

Nowhere do these elements collide more succinctly than in Cautionary Trail (2005), a painting in which a barrier of aprons strung between leafless aspen trees corrals dozens of women wearing patterned dresses. The women, whose facial expressions range from resigned to scornful, share a place with a row of simple gray houses on the far side of this dividing line. A few of the women approach the barrier, though it is unclear whether they are tying or untying the aprons. The ambiguity of these figures begins to suggest something larger about a woman’s own accountability for her role within an established social hierarchy, both within Cutler’s work and the worlds to which they allude.

In her paintings, Cutler explores symbols of domesticity and established responsibility through allegory—each scene is distinguished more by variations in her use of costuming and relative context than by topical variation. For instance, the

Tiger Mending, 2003; gouache on paper; 17.75 x 14.75 in. Courtesy of SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Cautionary Trail, 2005; gouache on paper; 16.5 x 22.25 in. Courtesy of SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico.

women in Viragos (2009) are clad in historical, festive peasant costumes, and they balance birdhouses from long poles anchored in their hair; the camel-like women in Plotline (2006) sport little black dresses, carry unplanted saplings on their backs, and march around a row of tiny houses. Each scene is like a single fragment torn from the middle pages of a discrete fairy tale, but also part of a larger continuum in which complex social behaviors performed by women are but ritualistic allusions to concerns about the home and family.

Though many of Cutler’s vignettes allude to a type of passive restraint sometimes considered to be the template for appropriate feminine behavior, at least one image raucously transgresses this trope. In Dinner Party (2002), clothing again serves as a referent for women’s historical endurance of certain social conditions. Yet, here, ladies in Victorian or Antebellum hoop skirts unleash an animalistic rage in preparation for some sort of battle. Two women stand on a dining room table that is half covered by a tapestry featuring dogs hunting deer. The women have tied chairs festooned with cleavers, knives, and other potentially dangerous household utensils to their hair. They rear back like bucks about to clash, toppling over a generous spread of food in the process. Nearby, two other finely dressed women are engaged in combat on the floor, and one is about to bring a blade down on the other. Whereas the home, social convention, and the availability of necessities have been viewed for centuries by moralizing cultural institutions as domesticating influences on humanity, the beast lying within Cutler’s ladies cannot always be contained. A woman’s place in relation to the dichotomous worlds of nature and civilization—the animal kingdom and the cultivated sphere of mankind—is another primary theme in Cutler’s work; competition persists, almost as a rite of passage.

Often humorous, Cutler’s engaging tableaus illustrate such contradictions within the Western world’s civilizing mission—particularly addressing the dehumanized role that women have frequently played in this undertaking. These social ruptures are tragically, comically, and painfully sutured within a vernacular framework that allows the artist space to point viewers in this direction without overtly moralizing her subject matter. Like all good fairy tales, Cutler’s allegories transport the viewer to new, magical realities that illuminate hidden peculiarities within our own strange world.

Amy Cutler is on view as part of Ruth Claxton / Amy Cutler / Runa Islam at SITE Santa Fe, in New Mexico, through May 15, 2011.

It’s no easy task to put a new spin on an artist whose work has been posthumously exhibited, theorized about, and revered for the past forty years, but this is what Eva Hesse: Studiowork, currently on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, proposes to do, and does so with surprising success. Curated by art historian Briony Fer and Barry Rosen, who handles the artist’s estate, the show makes a strong case for the importance of what the curators coin studiowork to the artistic legacy of Eva Hesse.

Nine years after Hesse’s death in 1970, her sister, Helen Hesse Charash, gave a group of small works, many of which had been left unfinished in the artist’s studio, to BAM/PFA. This exhibition highlights this unique segment of the museum’s collection, which forms the core of the works on view, and exposes an aspect of Hesse’s artistic practice that sheds new light on her iconic, fully realized sculptures and installations.

Hesse is renowned for her ambiguously corporeal sculptures from the 1960s that exist somewhere between figuration and abstraction, and which consist of unusual, notoriously difficult to conserve materials such as latex, tape, papier-mâché, rubber, and wax. Her interest in the tensile qualities of materials and her meticulous attention to craft set her apart from many of her contemporaries. Her work, which is frequently described as post-minimalist, bridges the interests and concerns of minimalists, conceptualists, and abstract painters of the 1960s and ’70s; it has had a profound influence on myriad artists since.

This exhibition demonstrates that influence at a close and intimate scale. The show opens with a beautiful display on a single, large, open platform of objects made of delicately sculpted cheesecloth and papier-mâché between 1968 and 1969. Each one is a meditation on the material qualities of a brittle and weightless object, like a shell or a plastic bag. In the following room is a series of six table-height vitrines that house different groups of smaller studioworks. One case holds a number of pieces created between 1964 and 1966, including one from 1966 that combines paint, wood, rubber, and metal; it appears to be a piece of wood into which two halves of a rubber ball have been screwed and then painted. We see in these sculptural objects an artist discovering and manipulating the individual material properties of found objects and learning to replicate those properties in unexpected ways as her technique was honed and sharpened. Her earlier experiments with manipulated ready-mades, such as the rubber ball piece, give way to mature sculptures that reference not only organic matter and processes but also their own objecthood—the way they occupy space in relation to each other and to us. One studiowork looks like a ribbed, deflated balloon or some kind of strange sea urchin at rest. On closer examination, we can see that Hesse has actually stapled small strips of latex together to create this three-dimensional creature.

Eva Hesse: Studiowork, installation view, UC Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo: Sibila Savage.

Eva Hesse: Studiowork, installation view, UC Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo: Sibila Savage.

The strikingly spare installation of the exhibition not only does justice to Hesse’s interest in spatial relationships, it also begs the question of how this configuration of objects was conceived. Fer offers, “The idea of grouping them together is fundamental to Hesse’s approach to all her work, much of which consists of multiple elements in fairly random arrangements. The look of accident is important: it suggests something more temporary than permanent.”¹ The tension between intentionality and randomness is connected to the important relationship between material and space in Hesse’s work. Just as she privileged everyday, non-precious materials, she also allowed for chance to take over in the installation and presentation of her work.² Installation could be dictated by the natural way that materials fell in space or deteriorated and changed over time. 

Temporality is a strong subtheme running through the exhibition. Some of the works are purely material experiments, achieving varying levels of success, while others are more mature; that distinction comes from close, unhurried examination. There is an implicit connection in this presentation between our recognizing that distinction and the way this work has changed physically. Hesse knew her materials and was well aware that the color of latex and resin would evolve—another instance in which the material characteristics of her objects correspond with the organic forms they resemble.

In defining studiowork, Fer integrates a contemporary reading of the importance of process in post-minimalism, applying to it the (now commonplace) notion that objects can be considered art in various states of completion. The exhibition makes a compelling case for this studiowork as an important part of Hesse’s oeuvre, without needing to artificially elevate these objects. Fer argues: “… in her notes, she referred to them as ‘samples.’ The word ‘test-piece’ was attached to them after her death, partly by default. It was, like ‘prototype,’ a word of the times, revealing a desire to link art with the language of industry.”³ This use of a term borrowed from industrial production is particularly interesting in the context of post-minimalism, which cast off the intentionally reductive nature of minimalist sculpture, insisting that pared-down geometric abstraction could coexist harmoniously with hand-craft and an interest in organic subject matter. Hesse’s work exemplifies this return to craft; her technical skill and fascination with what she could do with materials are reflected in Fer and Rosen’s choice to move away from industrial terminology in describing her work.

With this shift in emphasis toward process, we have the unique opportunity to examine the material, spatial, and temporal aspects of Hesse’s work from a new perspective. The careful selection and arrangements of work, complemented by a well-articulated thesis, sheds new light on the experiments of an artist fascinated by the way materials and objects interact with each other, and with viewers, in space and time. Eva Hesse: Studiowork wonderfully demonstrates how a contemporary reading of older work can open up our understanding of even the most closely examined artist.

Eva Hesse: Studiowork is on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum through April 10, 2011.

________
NOTES:

1. Briony Fer, “Eva Hesse: Studiowork,” exhibition pamphlet,(Berkeley: UC Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive, 2011).
2. Hesse exhibited some of these pieces in cases in her solo show Chain Polymers, at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1968, which served partially as a model for the installation of Eva Hesse: Studiowork.
3. Fer, Ibid.

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

“Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.”

(Marco Polo and Kublai Khan)
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities¹

________

Wider Views of Urban San Francisco, painter Randy Beckelheimer’s current show at ArtZone 461 Gallery, focuses on San Francisco’s Hunters Point, a decaying naval shipyard, the former home of a nuclear laboratory, and a federal Superfund site populated with decrepit buildings and a large community of artists who have remained because of the shipyard’s remote location, the pathos of a forgotten place, and cheap rents. In contrast to the enduring artist community, the surrounding Bayview neighborhood’s economic stumble has sparked the exit of many of the descendants of the African American shipyard workers.

The shipyard is geographically surrounded by water on three sides and is circumscribed by clear light and good weather. In Beckelheimer’s poetic paintings, the artist offsets the ghostly and apocalyptic landscape of the abandoned shipyard and the nearby but recently demolished PG&E smokestacks with his depictions of the beautiful light. In the spirit of the Venetian Renaissance painters Bellini, Titian, and Giorgione, he creates a soft atmospheric rendering of the shipyard by painting wet into wet oil paint, creating layers of transparent glazes. The harsh subject matter, seen through these glazes, creates a romantic fiction that seduces the viewer and tells profound truths like a good novel does, ones deeper and more meaningful than mere reportage can offer.

HPS-29, 2010; oil on canvas; 52 x 120 in. Courtesy of the Artist and ArtZone 461 Gallery, San Francisco.

HPS-20, 2008; oil on canvas; 64 x 96 in. Courtesy of the Artist and ArtZone 461 Gallery, San Francisco.

Newly arrived residents and a recent light-rail line down the Third Street corridor have helped invigorate the Bayview neighborhood. The developer Lennar Corporation imagines the shipyard’s future as mostly market rate housing, built in close proximity to a nuclear and chemical dump. The ongoing toxic cleanup of the shipyard temporarily forced Beckelheimer out of his studio. This removal is addressed in HPS-20 (2008), which shows one of the enormous trenches created while the developer’s contractors excavated and removed the sewer system pipes that contained radioactive waste.

Beckelheimer’s paintings reference fifteen years of photographing the shipyard and the surrounding community. Although originally an abstract painter, the artist’s habit of photographing and researching the shipyard led him to representational painting. A number of somber grayscale paintings in the show are based on historical images he found at the public library. He sometimes composes using “photo stitching,” a computer imaging technique for tacking images together into crude templates by combining multiple photographs, taken at different times of day, compounding them into whole paintings.

HPS-29 (2010), a ten-foot-long painting, depicts a reinvented shipyard landscape in the spirit of pioneer Bay Area photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge created large-format panoramic images of both urban and nature scenes by combining multiple images into large, spectacular single images. Filmmaker Hollis Frampton said that Muybridge’s early panoramic views “referred to a simultaneity which is at once plausible but perfectly impossible.”² In similar fashion, Beckelheimer’s panoramic paintings of the Hunters Point Shipyard force a viewer to question traditional notions of time and space, as well as the relationship between landscape photography and painting, history, memory, and illusion. This feat is accomplished though the lens of a camera, the painter’s hand, and the riddle of the sphinx.³

Wider Views of Urban San Francisco is on view at ArtZone 461 Gallery, in San Francisco, through March 6, 2011. An additional exhibition of Randy Beckleheimer's paintings can be seen in the lobby at 425 Market Street.

________
NOTES:

1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1974), 44.

2. Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), 160.

3. Lani Asher had an art studio at Hunters Point Shipyard for eighteen years, but has since moved her studio to the Mission district. For four years, she was a member of the Citizens Advisory Board, created by the federal Superfund law, which advised the Navy on toxic cleanup efforts. She was also an active member of Communities for a Better Environment, an environmental health and justice organization. She thanks Nan Kornfeld and shipyard artist Larry Morace for their insightful comments.

As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is republishing Caitlin Moore's article “Mike Kelley at Gagosian Gallery,” which you can also read here at Daily Serving.

________

Mike Kelley claims he doesn’t particularly like Superman. The jury is out on whether or not this qualifies him as a communist, but his claim does provide a source of perplexity when evaluating the inspiration for his ongoing Kandor sculpture and installation series – the newest of which being currently displayed at Gagosian Gallery (Beverly Hills) alongside the latest chapters of his filmic project, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (EAPR) (all works 2010).

In its original graphic incarnation, Kandor is noted as the fictional capital city of Superman’s native planet, Krypton. By the swift and conniving hands of the villainous Brainiac, the city was taken hostage and miniaturized for purposes not entirely sensible or mildly coherent—but not without valorous retrieval by our hero. Despite Superman’s Samaritan ways, the omnipresent plague of a haunting past hinders him from true emotional and psychological liberation—not to mention, visible underpants. For Kelley, the conceptual appeal lies in Kandor’s embodiment of an alienating victim culture for our protagonist: the notion of a burdensome present dictated by a labyrinthine past. Kelley’s unorthodox fusion of fragmented narrative, medium and sensory immersion seem nonsensical and queer at first encounter, yet the further we delve into his sensational rabbit hole, the closer we come to the truly bizarre fidelity of the human condition. Kelley confronts our latent attitudes and popular convictions relating to sexuality, socioeconomics, education and history with jocular finesse and—well—candor.

Like glowing orbs, a handful of Kandor sculptures pepper the multiple galleries within the darkened Gagosian megaplex. The dwarfed cities encased beneath colorful bell jars appear relic-like, yet also profane at times—their jutting skyscrapers evoking a curiosity born of both estrangement and familiarity. The two primary microcosms—Kandor 10 and Kandor 12—bear oversized tubes that snake into tanks of (presumably) atmosphere, per the accuracy of the comic book reference. Each is situated within environmental installations that embellish upon two distinct anecdotes central to the exhibition: the carnal Moroccan harem featured in EAPR #34, and the bleak sooty chamber that appears in EAPR #35. In merging his previously autonomous Kandor and EAPR projects, Kelley suggests an innate relationship between our own respective microcosmic realities and subsequent conditional behavior.

Extracurricular Projective Reconstruction #34, 2010 (video production still). Courtesy of Kelley Studio and Gagosian Gallery.

Kandor 12 A (green screen), 2010; tinted Urethane resin, steel, blown glass with water-based resin coating wood, enamel paint, silicone rubber, acrylic paint, lighting fixture and Lenticular 12; 126 x 202 x 276 in. overall. Courtesy of the Artist and Gagosian Gallery. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

By way of illustration, Kelley’s EAPR #34 videos largely examine the lascivious conduct of society’s upper echelon when handed unrestricted power and entitlement. Directed in the style of a maladroit stage play, EAPR #34 shifts between a piggish male King belittling his covetous female harem and a group of scornful Queens admonishing a male servant. In both scenarios, the authoritarian’s disposition to abuse of influence and insatiable gluttony bespeaks a cyclical global history of flawed paradigm and deep-rooted desire for accumulation. Beside the video installation, Kandor 10 is nestled within a life-size stony grotto reminiscent of EAPR #34’s exotic Moroccan setting, as if displaying the incubator in which these voracious human mannerisms were nurtured. When the Kandor’s luminous mini-cityscape appears more familiar than it does foreign, one can only muse on how fictitiously reconstructive Kelley’s staged milieu really is.

Conversely, EAPR #35 jettisons us into a place of somber isolation and denial. Grimy clownish gnomes aimlessly shuffle around a murky cell, their void gazes searching for an ambiguous cue. Homogeneous in tired costume and ashen faces, the destitute prisoners amble in silent futility—resigned to the dim prospects of their ordained condition.

The analogous Kandor 12 shares an equally inauspicious aesthetic; the cloudy brown bottle houses a municipality more reminiscent of chess pieces than modern skyscrapers—as if underlining the inmates’ loss of an unassailable game. The sparse backdrop of the gnomes’ cellar intimates a societal tradition of abhorrent secrecy and muted abuse of the weak, a ritualistic convention of marginalizing the vulnerable in order to preserve the greater hierarchy. As if acting as the underbelly to the rapacious actuality in EAPR #34, the vignette captured in EAPR #35 exposes the ensuing trauma that occurs in the wings as we strive to fulfill our socially performative roles – most of which remain immutably out of reach.

In fact, Kelley’s inclusion of the sets from the EAPR #34 and EAPR #35 videos in this exhibition make us feel but a mere player in one hell of a bewildering production. In tandem with his Kandors, the sets feel like an abstract extension of a transient ecology, a faux mise en scène demonstration of how we enact our own mortality. Do we unconsciously fall victim to institutional constructs in our quest for repute and satisfaction, acting a character merely to clinch our chances of eminence? Or do we find ourselves waiting in the wings for a cue—a protagonist—that may never come?

Mike Kelley: Kandor 10/Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 and Kandor 12/Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35 is on view at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills through February 19, 2011.

In an increasingly global art community, it’s not surprising to find artists working in cities as distant as Zurich and Tokyo grappling with very similar formal concerns. Pipilotti Rist and Motohiko Odani both create immersive audio/video experiences directly concerned with “beautiful” sensations, though their works diverge from there.¹

One enters Rist’s installation, A Liberty Statue for Tökyö (2009), on view as a special feature at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, through a ten-foot-tall dark blue velvet curtains. It includes a raised, cushioned brown floor, made of materials with a depth and permeability that discourages actually walking upright inside the space, instead promoting visitors to crawl. At the center of the space, a lacquered red grating is positioned level with the cushioning, housing both a projector and a large mirror. Its video plays on the ceiling, with a split picture-in-picture imagery reflected below.

The music in the video is composed of a swaying, synthesized melody that intermittently includes field recordings and other noises like insects and footsteps on gravel. Though formally resembling a soundtrack, it serves the mood of the piece rather than bolstering any kind of plot- or action-based reading of the video.

The video imagery is formatted to display one sequence appearing as a circle at the center of the projection and another sequence appearing around the first, filling out the square screen. The camera moves like a hand, gently tracing the various topographical surfaces, sweeping over natural and man-made objects at immediate range: long green grass, a woman’s hands and the top of her head as she climbs a tree, sandaled feet walking in white cotton socks, leaves and branches, a chain-link fence, a shiny brocade kimono, braided nylon rope. One segment features a woman’s hand trailing a lipstick line on a concrete interior, echoing the camera motion. Often the only apparent connection between the two sets of imagery is the saturated, slightly shifted color, with acidic greens, emphatically vibrant reds, warm yellows, and cold blues creating an energetic, complementary counterpoint to the mellow (verging on ponderous) soundtrack.

Pipilotti Rist. A Liberty Statue for Tökyö, 2009 (video still); audio and video installation; 9:47 min. Collection Sammlung Essl Privatstiftung, Klosterneuburg, Vienna; courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Worth, Zurich.

Motohiko Odani. Inferno, 2008–10 (video still); 8-channel synchronized HD video projection installation; 5:37 min. (loop). Courtesy of the Artist and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

The overall effect is of a glowing cocoon, like the materialization of the way one’s mind would recollect a hallucinatory trip to the park, mimicking the way memories can distill sensations and collapse temporal relationships. Combining footage from Tokyo and Zurich, it invites viewers to share in Rist’s revelry, sparing grown adults from the unseemly impropriety of rolling down a hill or climbing a tree themselves. (Even as a visitor from San Francisco, where we have historically had entire parks set aside for this specific type of ecstatic experience, I appreciated this carefully constructed opportunity for simple enjoyment.)

Inferno (2008), Odani’s eight-channel HD video and 4.1-surround-sound installation, is included in Phantom Limb, a mid-career retrospective encompassing his range of sculpture and video works on view at the Mori Art Museum, in Tokyo. It is a formal analog to Rist’s Liberty Statue in several ways.

Inferno consists of an octagonal interior space made of tall rectangular screens with a mirrored floor and ceiling. Projectors are positioned on the outside, showing synchronized footage of a high-contrast, extreme close-up of water droplets cascading in a dark space. The sound element is a long rumbling crescendo, a processed chorus of wordless human voice that is cinematic, reverberating, and grandiose.

The space reiterates many of Liberty Statue’s elements—the participatory element of entering an enveloping space, the extreme attention to the textural character of the video subject, the use of mirrors to expand the video presence and enhance visual symmetry, the related but not direct sequential linking of sound to image, even the physical size of the installation enclosure.

One major difference between the two pieces is the way Odani manipulates the pace and temporal direction of the video using slow motion and reversed footage. The effect inside the piece disrupts the logic of gravity. At the points where the screens meet each other and the mirrors, the symmetrical motion of the water implies points in empty space where matter is created and destroyed. By demonstrating his mastery over video, he creates an environment in which he appears to have control over time, space, and matter. Viewers are marooned, apparently levitating in an infinite tunnel of mirrored primordial images. Though water is a familiar, banal material, the motion, scale, and noise of Inferno transform it into something alien and sublime.

Another difference is the attitude with which each piece addresses its audience. Rist’s video, placed above and reflected slightly below the viewer, indirectly suggests that we should pay more attention to things we may normally overlook. Odani’s video, surrounding the viewer, eliminates all distractions and directs attention to his own technical mastery while reminding us all of our relative physical smallness and vulnerability. Both pieces, however, create gorgeous sensorial worlds unto themselves.

Special feature: Pipilotti Rist is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Tokyo, through May 8, 2011. Phantom Limb is on view at the Mori Art Museum, in Tokyo, through February 27, 2011.

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NOTES:

1. Motohiko Odani is alternately referenced with his surname listed first, as Odani Motohiko.

With his series of artistic interventions in the newly re-installed Gallery of California Art at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), Mark Dion posits that a museum is a dynamic site, the history of which is as worthy of investigation as the didactic exhibitions on view there. In The Marvelous Museum, Dion has carefully selected pieces from the museum’s permanent collection that might not otherwise be seen and placed them around the gallery, highlighting connections between science, history, and art. By juxtaposing these orphaned objects within a larger exhibition, Dion focuses viewers’ attention on the story behind the museum’s collection itself, pulling back the curtain to reveal what goes on behind the scenes.

OMCA’s Gallery of California traces the story of the landscape, history, and culture of the state. Through this, Dion weaves a secondary narrative focused on OMCA’s vast collection that is often unrelated to the themes in the main show. In doing so, he illuminates the role that curators play in making sense out of a vast array of artifacts and objects. Most of the interventions that Dion has orchestrated are on view throughout the Gallery of California. Objects in storage crates with accompanying classification tags highlight the double identities they assume when they enter the collection.

Dion has made his selections with an eye toward both the aesthetic and cultural connections between the works and those surrounding them. Some noticeably stand out, others blend in, and it is only with careful scrutiny that their identity as interlopers becomes apparent. A stuffed two-day-old baby

Architectural fragment from the Tubbs Cordage Co. building at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915; 32 in. overall, 22 in. diameter. Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California. Photo: David Maisel.

Taxidermied two-year-old Indian elephant from the Snow Museum of Natural History (one of the founding museums of the Oakland Museum of California), 1936; 58 x 78 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California. Photo: David Maisel.

giraffe stands next to a nineteenth-century sculpture of Venus, raising questions about the nature of portraiture. An architectural element made of thick rope stands amidst a room of outsider art, looking perfectly at home were it not for the packing crate in which it sits. Dion draws similar aesthetic connections between an electrical insulating column placed in a room of ceramics by artists such as Robert Arneson and Peter Voulkos. Sharing a similar material as these works and placed in proximity to them, the column’s formal beauty stands out more than its utilitarian function. In a room of 1960s minimalist artworks, Dion has placed a natural-history exhibit consisting of a cube of earth, which enters into a playful dialogue with a nearby pristine glass cube by Larry Bell. The comparison draws attention to the man-made quality of this seemingly “natural” work. Lastly, a set of drawers full of ’60s political and counterculture ephemera adds context to a room filled with like-minded art of the period. Part of the joy of the exhibition is in seeking out Dion’s orphans on one’s own, as he strives to recover a sense of wonder that has perhaps become conspicuously absent in museums.

Dion has also created two installations that literally display the inner working of the museum. First, he has re-created three curator’s desks: a nineteenth-century naturalist’s, a 1976 historian’s, and a contemporary art curator’s (modeled on the desk of OMCA’s own René de Guzman, who has been seen to sit in the installation from time to time). These desks illustrate the changing role of the curator—from organizer of scientific knowledge to arbiter of high culture. Indeed, the museum’s collections, assembled over decades, also reflect this evolving role, and hidden in a back corner of the exhibition is another installation that re-creates a museum storage room. Half-opened crates fill the center of the room, while mismatched oddities sit side by side in a storage cage: a stuffed bird next to historical examples of chairs next to a mounted set of walrus tusks. For children, this room conjures up thrills akin to the classic young adult novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, while for cultured museum-goers, it illustrates just how important a curator’s role is in shaping an exhibition from unordered objects.¹

Another part of The Marvelous Museum that bears mention is its catalogue; more than simply a portable compendium of the works on display, it is designed to resemble a crate and features the many objects than weren’t included in the actual exhibition. It also goes into greater depth about the development of the collection and the process of selecting the works from a pool of almost two million, revealing to viewers a glimpse of the making of an exhibition about making exhibitions.

The Marvelous Museum: A Project by Mark Dion is on view at the Oakland Museum of California through March 6, 2011.

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NOTES:

1. E.L. Konigsburg. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (New York: Atheneum Press, 1967).

La Destitution de la Jeune Fille (The Deposition of the Young Girl) is the second solo show of the collective The Old Boys’ Club, the assumed moniker of multimedia artist Katya Bonnenfant, on view at Haines Gallery. The mysterious gouache drawings, sculptures, and animations that fill the gallery are isolated, small studies of her recent show of the same name that was on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.¹ The show at Haines Gallery holds its own ground, despite the fact that these smaller drawings are positioned as studies of the same images rendered into a large wallpaper and mixed-media installations at YBCA. This new, fragmented version creates a visual history—a counter-narrative that uses tactics of appropriation and refigures history and visual culture in order to comment on structures of power, violence, and history.

Groupings of framed and unframed small-scale gouache drawings fill the gallery walls, revealing an overwhelming visual narration of an unknown civilization through figures resembling hieroglyphics. The Old Boys’ Club’s stylized cartoonish hand at first makes the images easy to approach, but a closer look quickly complicates a viewing. Colorful depictions of arcane symbols, fleshy figures, masked creatures, and strangely familiar landscapes are pieced together in small form, but in monumental arrangement. There is a sense that the sheer number of these drawings points to a significance that is great, yet that remains mysterious to the viewer. Like the forms and figures represented in the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, the cuneiform writings of ancient Sumeria, or the hieroglyphics of Egypt, the scale and craft of the images suggest a deeply relevant meaning to its maker, even if that meaning is uncertain to other viewers.

The characters in the drawings seem to be human, and their costumes teeter visually between superhero spandex and some ambiguous global cultural appropriation of tribal or traditional dress. Pieced together, some elements of the figures’ costumes are distinctly recognizable, pulled from the vast span of the visual landscape, and others are reminiscent of particular cultural representations—a certain perception or coalescence of cultural accoutrements. A bandana-masked cowboy or a teal-bodied figure wearing a World War I–era gas mask are depicted next to other figures, which are adorned with what resemble Japanese Hanya masks or Javanese headdresses. In Study for La Destitution de la Jeune Fille #38 (2010), a concealed figure wears a burka and holds a metal-tipped spear, while a figure nearby wears a deep-sea diving suit, even fitted with a three-bolt brass diving helmet. The one consistent characteristic among the figures is that they are all armed, mostly with spears and the occasional samurai sword.

Throughout the series of drawings, this reoccurring band of nimble, masked, and spear-bearing characters fights, attacks, and captures. The figures are grouped disparately and outfitted diversely and could leap off the page and spear a viewer with the precision and strength of a trained warrior.

Studies for La Destitution de la Jeune Fille, 2010; installation view, Haines Gallery, San Francisco. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery. Photo: Monique Deschaines.

Study for La Destitution de la Jeune Fille #41, 2010; gouache on paper; 12 x 9 in. Courtesy of Haines Gallery, San Francisco.

But it is not always clear who fights whom: there are no obvious sides and no distinct evidence that any of the characters fight for the right cause, whatever that might mean for them. The victory is unknown, as is the case in many depictions of battlefields. There is a quiet ambiguity about what moment one is witnessing—is this an epic battle scene, documented grandly as such moments often are? Is this a moment right before an act of violence? Or perhaps these are the moments after such an act, full of an echoing emptiness.

It is clear, though, that this is a symbolic war, fought on a battlefield that conflates a global visual and historic landscape—and The Old Boys’ Club takes liberties with any sort of historical accuracy. This work addresses a space where the residue of history may offer a refigured representation of certain pasts and, by default, futures, but not necessarily a specific retelling of it. The Old Boys’ Club archives the remnants of patterns, spaces, and practices that civilizations leave behind, but not with an archeologist’s hand or an historian’s precision. The works chart a space of history that is unmoored and unfixed—a rhizomatic space; it is, perhaps, a counter-historical narrative of the inhabitants of an unknown space, where there is no beginning, middle, or end. Maybe it is an ethnographical analysis into a civilization one may not know, but in which one disarmingly recognizes oneself, in some not so far off dystopian future.

The Old Boys’ Club strategically creates this nebulous historical space by borrowing visual accoutrements from past and present visual landscapes. La Destitution de la Jeune Fille raises a certain question about the efficacy of using appropriations rooted in cultural borrowing, as well as the consumption of handpicked accoutrements or iconography, in order to critique the inevitable mixing of a postcolonial cocktail. Can the very thing performed also be critiqued? Yet, there is an unapologetic rhythm—a sort of method to the madness—behind The Old Boys’ Club’s counter-narratives; built into the fabric of this visual saga are the reciprocal exchanges that exist within power and, therefore, violence. One who has power over another is dependent on the powerless to acknowledge and allow the powerful to maintain that role. The Old Boys’ Club creates an epic landscape of ambiguous enemies and uncertain allies who duke it out on an unknown battleground: a fluid, yet precarious space where history is uprooted. As the collective suggests that power is what one allows it to be, we’re left with the most important question—to what end?

La Destitution de la Jeune Fille (The Deposition of the Young Girl) is on view at Haines Gallery, in San Francisco, through April 2, 2011.

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NOTES:

1. La Destitution de la Jeune Fille (The Deposition of the Young Girl) was on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from October 14, 2010 to January 9, 2011.

As part of our ongoing partnership with Daily Serving, Art Practical is republishing Michael Tomeo's article "True Grit: Michaela Eichwald at Reena Spaulings," which you can also read here at Daily Serving.

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It’s not that Michaela Eichwald doesn’t give a crap about her paintings; she just beats the shit out of them. It’s part of a lengthy weathering process that imbues them with the perfect balance of attraction and repulsion. Before they get to the gallery, they’ve been stepped on, left out in the rain, randomly stained, and often chemically altered. Eichwald decimates boring oil painting clichés (think “fat over lean”) by glopping oil, acrylic and varnish seemingly at random. Yet, despite their abject quality, her work feels uniquely intimate. She stakes a claim somewhere between the automated work of, say, Wade Guyton and the ubiquitous “special moments” abstraction crowd that seems destined to follow the Nozkowski/Tuttle/De Keyser rules in perpetuity.

Thankfully, there’s more than enough personality on view here to keep Eichwald away from the ugly-on-purpose thing. Pofalla, (willst Du mir jetzt komplett den Garaus machen?) is downright epic. Spanning the entire length of the gallery, it includes photos, posters, packaging, tribal imagery, personal notes, geometric forms, splats of paint and tons of lacquer. The overall effect is like a Rauchenbergian run-on sentence—Eichwald seems to be spilling and organizing her guts right on the paper. And like Rauschenberg, she understands when to let the material do the talking. The yellowed lacquer also performs a rather tawdry version of Sigmar Polke’s experiments with alchemy.

The Three Cravings, 2010.

Peinliche Verhörung mit Tortor (Hand), 2010.

Unlocking and then encasing both personal and universal mysteries, Eichwald’s work has an authenticity that feels organically unforced. She combines cave painting motifs with silhouettes in Auer Dult, leidende Mangel, referring to the centuries-old market and folk festival in Munich. Installed behind a pipe in the well-worn “bar” area of the gallery, the unstretched painting has both a nomadic and site-specific feel. The Three Cravings, the most straight ahead painting in the show, could almost pass for a roughed-up riff on U.S. abstraction, like an Amy Sillman painting stripped down to its essence.

Eichwald’s powers seem extra concentrated in Peinliche Verhörung mit Tortor (Hand), a horrifying cast resin sculpture of a hand resting on a small plunger. I’ve never been so drawn to something as utterly untouchable as this. The hand oozes and drips and tiny nails stick out of its mangled fingers. A spent gum packet is encased inside, and random bits of trash and dirt float about. Installed on a windowsill, this terrifying talisman becomes oddly beautiful as the sooty light from the Lower East Side shines through it.

Overall, there’s an almost teenage sense of vitality in Eichwald’s work, a tendency that is unfortunately forced out of artists while they are in grad school. Because of this, the show might not live up to the bullshit standards of a typical Chelsea affair (after a while you start to pick apart her repetitive palette, and the dependence on lacquer can be a bit much), but I like to see an artist who believes so strongly in the power of physical presence. As grimy as her work might look, Eichwald seems to be coming from a place that is surprisingly pure.

Michaela Eichwald is on view at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, in New York, through February 6, 2011.