Soo Kim

Soo Kim

Sandroni Rey

Through June 14th

In 1980, Bob Irwin converted a store front in Venice into what may have been the perfect expression of that most explored vocabulary definition -- everyone’s favorite words, “inside” and “outside.” I was still in diapers, but the story goes that people on the street walked up to a soft white wall, gleaming on the side of what must of been a dirty Venice street (only recently did Venice get a Pinkberry). The longer the people on the street stood there, the deeper their reward. The wall gave way as their eyes came to handle the light. The wall (a scrim of cloth sheathing) dissolved and they could see into a white studio space. Literally, a firm “outside” gave way to equally real “inside.” This was not a metaphor for inside and outside. This was not a painting. This was transition from a lived sense of outside to a lived sense of inside.

I thought of the Irwin piece when visiting Soo Kim’s new show at Sandroni Rey in Culver City -- to be honest, I first thought about the Irwin at Kim’s show last year. In that show, Kim painted the walls in subtle shades of white, greys, soft browns in attempt to mimic, negotiate, and change the shadows and light that naturally play in the gallery through its two skylights. I thought at the time that the installation was quite beautiful and intuitive like that Irwin piece must have been, but at the time, I had the sense that Kim, unlike Irwin, works in a quasi-representational mode, that her variations on light and on “inside” and “outside” must be tied to symbol and metaphor, to pictures and the imagination, instead of a scientific experimentation with how one sees.

Kim’s new show of all photographs tells me that I am onto something. Some of the photos are of light playing on a window pane, leaves and trees are reflected onto and through the pane, but the vast majority of the photos are of a woman laying her head on a table like a bored kid in detention, rolling this way and that, looking out down up and out again. She appears to be in continuous motion, each moment slightly different. In the gallery, the viewer feels the continuity. Present in the series as a whole, both the window photographs and the tables, is modern architecture, organized with its lines dissolving into light and shadow and its well critiqued stifling rigor sent off in a breath.

In the table photographs, however, Kim has cut macramé patterns with lyrical, swirling loops and little birds and animals into the surface of the paper. The photographs are set off the white of their frame so it is less the white of the matte that filters through the cut holes as much as air. Overall, the impact is not very dramatic but instead understated and demure -- from a distance the patterns merge seamlessly with the photographs, upclose the patterns assert themselves like a shy young child. At times, the woman in the photo appears to have control of the macramé patterns, as a puppetmaster with strings. At other times, the patterns consume and almost erase the woman entirely. At certain moments, the patterns leave the woman. All of these patterns are worlds of imagination, of fantasy and daydreaming.

So the question for me became – is this current show an exercise in fantasy or experiential installation or both? How can fantasy play into an experiential installation if we as viewers do not share the fantasies of the woman in the photos?

Whereas Irwin was looking for an almost scientific rigor in how we see, Kim uses the same principles as a fertile ground for flights of fancy, for graceful aesthetic twists. Kim’s flights ultimately are somewhere between representation and direct experience – we don’t sense or the feel the animals but we see their image. However, we both see and sense the patterns float, dissolve, and change in the space. I found this strangely pleasing – somewhere between Yeat’s portrayal of a Foundling in his great, great poem The Stolen Child and Irwin’s scrim works.

The difference between Irwin and Kim is one of imagination. Kim’s woman languishes and lulls on top of the table, dreaming that the division between her and the world of her dreams will dissolve, and the installation itself partially mimics what this is like. Although we can’t know the mind of the girl, the transitions that she desires is at least partially conveyed to us in her shape shifting photos.

Robert Rauschenberg: Obituary

Robert Rauschenberg, Art Pioneer, dead at 82

Charles Stuckey once wrote that Robert Rauschenberg considered art a gift. In Italy in 1953, Rauschenberg took the great artist Alberto Burri one of his works as a present. He gave gifts to his friends – there's one infamous but lovely story where Rauschenberg repainted a black painting he had given John Cage because the composer was a few minutes late and he needed something to do. Rauschenberg created a foundation to help out struggling artists that did not have enough money to live on. His R.O.C.I, the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, aimed to bring new art making techniques, technology, and energy to other cultures. Rauschenberg’s generosity was famous, and with his death at 82 on Monday night, he will be dearly missed.

Rauschenberg’s vision of gift giving changed art forever. For not only did he give, he received in a wonderful way. Rauschenberg’s inspired collaboration with people like Cage, Susan Weil, Merce Cunningham, Steve Paxton, Jean Tinguely, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Willem De Kooning, and even Dante (that’s a small fraction of the collaborations just in the 50s) led to a sea change in art making -- a festival of allowances, amendments, and multi-disciplinary experiments that affects everything serious in art today. I will let all the competent critics around the country way in on this fact. You will find a compendium of them here.

I want to tell stories and stories are what brought me to Rauschenberg. The wonderful stories that came from Rauschenberg’s long life are why I love him and will miss him. I love that he grew up in Port Arthur, Texas and ended up in New York. I love that Janis Joplin attended his high school in Texas but that they were not friends. I love it that the first artwork to inspire him was Blue Boy, a painting still hanging at the Huntington where it was hanging when he saw it. He hated Joseph Albers but went on to acknowledge his great influence. He once decided that he wanted to photograph the entire United States foot by foot and actually made it down Black Mountain College’s drive way.

It is wonderful that Rauschenberg and John Cage decided one day to cover the wheels of a Model T with ink and run it over a long sheet of paper in the street. It is still a famous fact that he erased a De Kooning but did it in a way that was not offensive or juvenile. He drank whiskey, a lot of whiskey – always Jack Daniels. When he was to have an exhibition at the now defunct and worthy of study Stable Gallery (paging all grad students) in the fifties, he and Twombly had to clean out its basement themselves. In a world of Abstract Expressionism, he decided to illustrate Dante, put a tub of mud in a gallery, and make a paining out of dirt and grass (he watered it himself). And then there is this, absolutely priceless: Leo Castelli and U.S. officials had to sneak his painting into the main pavilion of the 1963 Venice Biennial at night so that the French would consider it for the prize. They did consider it, and Rauschenberg won.

We are still only up to 1963 – this went on to the present.

Who was this guy? How does one man have such a life? A good Texan I’d say – bigger than life. We would like to think it was all a tall tale. It wasn’t. I cannot do Rauschenberg justice. It is all just too big for me, too generous, too wonderful. If you ever get down on art, if you are ever jaded by theory or are not seeing anything you think is worth looking at (you know who you are) – just reach for any Walter Hopps written Rauschenberg catalogue and you will be okay. Just look at Monogram – if you don’t look at that phallic, paint splattered goat and laugh, well, you are too far gone. I can’t help you.

To close, I want to tell my own Rauschenberg story – how, I found him. Believe it or not, I came to Rauschenberg’s work by way of Bruce Chatwin and Alexander Rodchenko. I had read a cryptic, wonderful story about how Chatwin had visited Rodchenko’s granddaughter in Asia. When the writer asked about his famous “Ultimate Painting,” three monochrome panels in the primary colors called Pure Red, Pure Yellow, and Pure Blue, 1921, she led him to her basement where the canvases were rolled up.

I became fascinated by the poetry and irony that the “Ultimate Painting” had been abandoned and was now in a basement. This perfect absurdity seemed to answer the theoretical questions of the death of painting I was reading at the time. It told me that I didn’t need to worry about it – that any endpoint in art is mere rhetoric, a tenure track insider witticism that affects very few people. That same day, I opened up a Rauschenberg catalogue and found out I was right. Art is generous, art goes on, art tells us there is always more to see, more to do. Art is a gift. Rauschenberg knew this. Rauschenberg always had something to do.

IcallitORANGES Rauschenberg links: Shirt Boards and my favorite, an early Black Mountain piece