I call it ORANGES

Robert Irwin in Art Review

2012-01-18T09:52:00.000-08:00

Robert Irwin
L&M Venice
Closed October 22nd

In the December, 2011 issue of Art Review, I invite you to read my review of Robert Irwin at L&M, Venice. This is a link to the article online.

Thanks for Reading

Hastings Plastics

2012-01-05T17:25:00.000-08:00

You may not know about Hastings Plastics, a hardware store specializing in space age materials and plastics for over 55 years in Santa Monica, but it could be argued that Light and Space Art stemmed from its services. Here is a tribute to Hastings Plastic that I wrote for the L.A. Weekly.

http://www.laweekly.com/2012-01-05/art-books/Hastings-Plastics-sculptures/

If you are interested in more content on Hastings, listen to this week's Modern Art Notes Podcast

http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/01/the-man-podcast-christopher-knight-on-pst/

Thanks for Reading and Listening,

Ed

An I call it ORANGES Top Ten

2011-12-30T15:53:00.000-08:00

My Favorite Art of 2011

The Clock at LACMA: I’m not the first nor the last to love Christian Marclay’s The Clock, an incredible achievement that even now is difficult for me to fully talk about. That said, I’ll stop talking, and let Zadie Smith's great piece speak to it here.

Getty Presentation of Pacific Standard Time: Rarely does one get an opportunity in art to assess history with the archives thrown open and all the art on view. Typically, we hunt and pick and collage a vision of art history from rumors, images, and the opinions of others. PST is an extraordinary moment to counter that hobnob horror, a chance to make up our own minds about Los Angeles Art with everything at our fingertips. The heart of the monumental project is a tight installation at the Getty that is simply perfect – great works by great artists. I continue to discover things in PST and it’s very exciting.

Mourners at LACMA: A stunning little show, The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy featured thirty-seven sculptures from the tomb of John the Fearless (1371–1419), the second duke of Burgundy. These small works were truly incredible, offering a full range of emotion and a truly profound experience. I long for more of these tiny shows from the past, I wish they would take over contemporary art museums and not give them back, I wish they would populate the earth and let us think and write and meditate in a world that’s much too fast.

John Marin at Fort Worth Modern: Fort Worth’s triad of the Fort Worth Modern, The Kimbell, and The Amon Carter is one of the best spots for art in America, bar none. And who would have ever thought that after being amazed by Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings at the Modern and feasting on Caravaggios at the Kimbell, that I’d fall hardest for the Maine eccentric modernist Marin at The Amon Carter. A truly amazing watercolorist, Marin was both ahead, behind, and of his time, which he shared with both Hopper and Pollock. I came to see Marin as Cezanne with a cold, doing for Maine with gloved freezing hands what the Frenchman did for Provence.

Dance Your Life at the Pompidou: On the heels of very, very long day and being disappointed by artists I am supposed to like (namely Edvard Munch and Cyprian Gaillard), I went into a massive show historicizing dance and art. I know nothing of dance and was not optimistic, but ended up completely absorbed, drawn into the narrative and amazed by the content. Imagine the opportunity to see footage from almost all of Rauschenberg’s early collaborations next to wild videos of Josephine Baker next to truly bizarre rehearsals of huge Nazi rallies. This was a great show. I went to eat and came back. I didn’t care about my feet. I hope someone brings this show to the U.S.

Jasper Johns at IVAM, Valencia: On a work trip, unexpectedly I found this show in Valencia, Spain, and was floored to discover the show was almost full of loans from Johns’ personal collection, including some sentimental additions that I not only didn’t know about but will change the way I view Johns’ work as a whole. For instance, a little ink work on vellum with Johns’ targets painted a pin-wheel pattern was made for Teeny Duchamp to keep her company during a long illness. It would spin in the air above her bed. Also, Johns once made a work on leather. Who knew?

Helen Pashgian and Mary Corse at Ace Gallery, Beverly Hills: Pashgian and Corse are my “what is wrong with you, how could you have missed this” artists of the year. Both are considered part of the light and space movement but far less advertised than their male counterparts. In fact, they are probably better. Corse’s surface effects are dazzling and almost impossible to photograph. Pashgian puts a sensual, sexy spin on natural phenomena that makes other light and space artists seem puritanical by comparison.

Bob Irwin at L&M Venice: Irwin is a hero for me. I admire the man, I admire the work. He, more than anyone else, proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that art is beyond markets, museums, galleries, or theory. Instead a part of the soul, part of how we orient ourselves in life, an essential part of existence in a philosophical sense. High praise for florescent light strips, I know, but this show (though saleable and slick) had everything Irwin, which is not only enough but everything.

Mark Grotjahn at Anton Kern: A sister show to his Blum and Poe show a year earlier, Grotjohn continued his fluttering shimmers of gnarly paint at Anton Kern. Saltz fawned and so did I. Grotjahn is the best painter in Los Angeles, not only in technique but also in pure historical resonance. There is as much Johns crosshatch in these works as Picasso primitive, as much gesture and expression as there is cold distance and study. They go on and on for me. I can’t quite figure them out and find them almost impossible to write about, which to me is the sign that there is something huge going on.

David Hammons at L&M: I hated it at first. I went into my usual histrionics about how New York critics need a hero and how it might as well be Hammons -- how off-putting the show was, how difficult, My God that little piece of plastic hanging from the ceiling in a brownstone mansion! I continued my rant about how disconnected the artworld is, how finding rough tarps and worn armoires in front of paintings is not enough to mediate on the friction between social classes. Then, I just yelled myself out. I continued to think about things and found that not only was I interested but that I truly cared about what Hammons was doing, though admittedly at the moment, I don’t know exactly what that was.

Elliot Hundley at Regen Projects: Hundley gets better and better and more sure of himself. This, and his previous show at Andrea Rosen, took me past “it looks like Rauschenberg” and “fun with collage” stage to the realization that Hundley is a fully formed artist, confident in his medium and speaking with his own voice. His continued engagement with Greek theater deepens and his interaction with the fantastic poet Anne Carson leaves me optimistic and thrilled to have Hundley in L.A. His new Wexner show is forthcoming.

Julian Hoeber at Blum and Poe and the Hammer Museum: I misread these shows, finding more cynicism than depth at first. I even wrote those thoughts in Art Review, London. However, Hoeber is a good artist, an interesting artist, whose project, though at present it eludes me, has me interested and studying. The artworld can be a “one of the boys” affair, with Nate Lowmans and Dan Colens truly giving the world empty “bro” art that is less lively than just arrogant and empty headed. Hoeber is not one of the boys, and though he traffics in some of the same territory, he is not only much smarter but also more vital. I expect him to emerge as a force in the upcoming years, an antidote to a very thin art scene which spends more time in the Artforum diary than in the world.

Why I’m Not Going to See Five Car Stud at LACMA

2011-10-11T17:59:00.000-07:00

Edward Kienholz: Five Card Stud (1969 - 1972), Revisited

LACMA

Through January 15, 2012

I’d just finished my freshman year of college in Texas when I heard about the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas. Mr. Byrd was dragged by his ankles behind a pickup truck for almost 3 miles. What was left of his body was dumped in front of an African-American cemetery. I tear up remembering the event and the details of the murder even now. The legislation which arose from the crime, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, was signed by President Obama in October of 2009, 11 years after that horrible June night in 1998.

At the time in Texas, what made the crime so horrible for me was not that it was surprising or unbelievable but the opposite—I found the crime quite believable. We were all party to it, had responsibility for it whether we were there or not. Many times, at late night bars or in parking lots, I’d seen the tongues of people loosen, letting racial and homophobic slurs fly. I’d seen alcohol and groupthink turn people violent, though nothing much happened and most of the violent tremor was just posturing and people being pulled off skittish fights. Thankfully, at no time for me has the exact wrong circumstances been present that would send a minor situation into a full-blown hate crime. However, it chills me to not know whether or not I would have the courage to rise up and resist in such a situation. I’d like to think I would. I also feel the potential for explosive situations around me, even in Los Angeles.

I’ve decided not to see Five Car Stud, 1969-1972, at LACMA by Edward Kienholz. I’ve spent a lot of time grappling with the decision. I’m not calling for censorship. I’m not saying that the show should have never of happened or that the piece is not important or even that Kienholz is a bad artist (though I don’t like most of his work). I’m just saying that I am not going to see it. For me the decision is neither reactionary nor flippant, more a sense, a warning in my heart that there is a difference between seeking to address a horror, thinking it through, and being drawn towards the encounter of it in a brutish way, told to look, and then taking on the weight of universal shame without the recourse to grapple with it, quite hit over the head and in a daze to either balk and flee or look deeply and coarsen. There’s more to it, of course. What is it that makes me shy here, what says for me to step no further?

In saying that I’m not going to see Five Car Stud, I immediately come up against a series of expected objections. There is of course, “How can you judge something that you haven’t seen?” There is an extension of that in “How can you have any firm knowledge of the piece that would compel you to not see it?” Coupled with these initial thoughts, one might go to places like “Are you too cowardly to face the truth of racism and the tough aspects of history?” or “Do you prefer the complacency of safe art, is this why when something truly radical comes along, you run and hide? How can you have a proper view of the march of art history and be content to miss a spot, to not live it and experience it yourself?”

All of these complaints are, of course, made up by me as a sort of thought experiment to test my decision to not see the piece by Kienholz. All the complaints are just and all have a point, even if that point should be the start of a discussion and not taken as self-evident. However, all I have in my defense and in response to these questions are a clumsy set of notions about the power of art, the historical documentation of the piece, and genuine belief that art’s only purpose is to provide something for and against which I can form a self—myself—the self with which I hope to live a fulfilling and successful life.

That last sentiment comes from Lionel Trilling, and I admit the great critic is on my mind when I think of Five Car Stud. He exudes a great influence on my writing, especially as I am currently reading, inhaling, and reviewing another one of my favorite critics Adam Kirsch’s new book, titled simply Why Trilling Matters? Why Trilling matters, according to Kirsch, can be distilled down to one essential, powerful thought. Kirsch writes, “I hope to emphasize that part of his achievement that has meant the most to me; his demonstration of what it means to create one’s self through and against the books one reads.”

I admire Kirsch and I admire that the creation of a self can be so boldly put forth by a major critic as a purpose and end of art. This is, of course, a remnant of the Humanism that dominated art discourse for centuries before it was (apparently) discounted and proved invalid. I don’t want to belabor this part of the discussion because it is my decision about Five Car Stud and not criticism that is on the line here, but the chief beef that people usually have with the idea of art as purposed by the construction of a self is that it is difficult to know what a self is, whether a self even exists. The idea of a self proposes a set of problems about knowledge, about how we know things, the nature of reality. In the end, in the face of the Holocaust, massive dehumanizations, through war, corporate mentalities, and the machinations of power in all shapes and sizes, how can a self exist when split into so many pieces? If the self exists, how can it be personal, how can an individual exist when circumstances dictate their lives, only giving them the illusion that it is the will that matters, that decision making is central?

Kirsch and Trilling are mindful of all of these battlefields of the self yet manage to believe in the self anyway and make it central to their criticism and central to art. In fact, their fealty to the self makes me intent in bringing such discussions to visual art. Their belief in the self and progress of the self is a way to get a handle on reality, a position in politics, and even, most astonishing to me, as a way to get a handle on artistic style, for style is the interface between art and the self, style is art’s way of communicating with people, it’s personality, it’s attitude.

Now what this has to do with Five Car Stud is that here is a work of art that just screams out and demands that you take a position in your life. It’s got attitude, a brazen “Cut to the chase, Don’t waste time. Get to the real thing,” attitude, as critic David Shields once described realism. From the rush of press releases and historical catalogues heralding its importance, the images in Walter Hopps exhaustive Kienholz catalogue from 1996, one can easily glean that Five Car Stud not only demands that you take a position in your life, but it gives you one. A crime is going on, a horrible racially motivated castration complete with frightful masks and helpless spectators. You observe this moment, frozen in time. The ground is covered in dirt. You will leave the installation with dirt on your shoes. By most accounts and through documentation photography, the viewer stands in a position of helplessness. The dirt on your shoes is exactly what Kienholz wants and is his belief about what makes strong, moral art.

In making the decision about whether or not to see Five Car Stud, I experience a number of torturous questions. First of all, is it just for Kienholz to place viewers in a position of blanket indictment? Is that not a blunt, unsophisticated handling of the history of racism? Is it not through humanization that we understand the dark shadows and nuances of history, what good is there is turning people into types, into shells, stand-ins for blanket, line-in-the-sand delineations of good and evil? It is true that the Kienholz represents pure evil, pure evil exists, though with situations of “pure evil,” it is difficult to see yourself in them for life is more about ordinary, unspectacular seductions of small evils that lead to big ones, it feels strange to arrive instantly to pure evil all at once because life just simply does not work that way. Second, is the decision of whether or not to allow oneself to see the piece, taking in the angles, searching one’s own heart to find one’s place inside of the moral universe, not enough of an animation to contemplation of horrors? If one finds oneself properly engaged with the subject matter, is the gut punch of seeing the piece in person not just gratuitous? What use is the dropping of the stomach, the pallor on the cheek, the torpor of helplessness? Finally, is not the decision to see the work a personal thing? When you are in reality, what good is there in seeing more and more of it, especially since Kienholz himself, despite all of his apparently heroic truth bombs, is only one commentator of many?

That's where one comes to the issue of style and how style relates to the self. It is my sense, and I would posit for Trilling and Kirsch too, reality presented as a blunt, ham-fisted fact might not be helpful way of reckoning with self-hood. Actually, Kirsch, through Trilling, writes that literature (which I am expanding to include visual art) “justifying itself by paying homage to reality, conceived as a brute sociological fact, is a trap.” The reason a blunt instrument of reality is a trap because it fails to account for the mind’s interaction with reality, the place of the imagination in positioning and flavoring reality. Blunt reality in art (artless straight ahead realism) can do very little to activate the imagination’s role in reality other than just scream. Sometimes, the scream is necessary, as it may have been in 1969, when Kienholz started to work on it (Again, I am not condemning the piece, doubting its historical efficacy at the time it was made), but having the scream repeat over and over till the end of the time, without the further ability to hear the history or humanity of the voices, is not necessary for the awareness of horror.

To give some examples, I think of a scene in Werner Herzog’s movie Grizzly Man where the viewer does not hear the audio tape of Timothy Treadwell’s death, but instead witnesses Herzog listening briefly, then placing the head phones down. The activation of the imagination here is reverential to Treadwell (not playing to the spectacle of his death) through an activation of the imagination through removed details. To cite another instance, critics have praised Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece of Holocaust documentary Shoah, 1985, for its ability to linger inside of your heart, not out of bluntness but out of style, out of allowing testimony rather than the horrors of images to relate the trauma. Both Herzog and Lanzmann activate the moral imagination rather than deaden it through blunt force. There is a reason why I continue to cling to another of Trilling’s thoughts that the direct contemplation of cruelty cannot help but make us cruel ourselves—because I suspect it to be right.

The anniversary of James Byrd’s death in Jasper has haunted me lately. This is probably the chief reason the Kienholz frightens me, and the very personal reason why I won’t see it. I’ve never seen a representation of the Jasper murder nor seen crime scene photos. I’ve read articles, but mostly it was the hearsay and the word of mouth that made it chilling. I wondered and still wonder who amongst my friends in Texas, at the time rendered quiet or reflective about the crime, might be capable of playing a role in such an event? Could I have played a role in such an event had I not left my small town in Texas? These moral unknowns activate the moral imagination as long as I just focus my attention, the imagination that is bound in reality, the imagination that has a role in constructing a self. I can’t turn away because the reality has quietly taken root in me through its shy whispers and its commemorative markers. There is no need to put me in a position of helplessness in order to test helplessness. There is only the need plant the seeds of a story that can contribute to the self rising above helplessness without it being desensitized.

The last thing I need is Five Car Stud. With panoply of wonderful, well studied and lovingly wrought artworks speaking about hate and race (I immediately think of the novels of Toni Morrison or Taylor Branch’s epic and incredible historical trilogy Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge), I question the value, in terms of building a self and in terms of the moral imagination, of me personally seeing Kienholz’s large installation.

A truism of art is that it is subjective, yet most often the terms of writing and criticism focus on formal details and historical timelines. If art is subjective, then it is the subject that matters and it is beneficial to take the interaction between the work and the subject seriously. For me, trying my best to take Five Car Stud as seriously as I can with as much range as I can, the result is that the piece is better left in its room for someone else to see. It is a work that for me is perhaps too powerful, too blunt, too aggressive, too artless. The last thing I want, with a subject as large as racism or as individual as James Byrd in Jasper, is to, in Trilling’s words, have an instance of “the museum knowingness about art . . . our consumer’s pride in buying only the very best spiritual commodities.” To each their own, as they say, as long as the ownership is a deep rich engagement.

Pacific Standard Time

2011-10-11T10:25:00.000-07:00

Pacific Standard Time
L.A. Weekly
September, 2011

I hope that you will check out my recent L.A. Weekly article, a trip around L.A. art history through the sites it left behind. Here is a link. Thanks!

Also, check out the fantastic Getty Catalogue, a must read.

Jacob Kassay

2011-08-09T15:15:00.000-07:00

Jacob Kassay
L&M Arts
Through September 2nd

Reposted from www.artslant.com

Twenty-seven year old Jacob Kassay’s monochromes at L&M are functions of science and grace. Using a variation of electroplating, metal particles adhere to the surfaces like fields of glimmering dust. The scientific process, however, is the unobtrusive backdrop to subtle variations of color, dry matte bronzes next to pinks, pinks next to cool whites. The paintings have a light touch, and the impression is that Kassay’s L&M show wants to induce feelings of careful calibration and elegance, existence centered in nuance. The paintings are nice. Simply that.

Most texts on Kassay (there are few) puzzle over his price points and the meteoric rise in demand for his work even though his name remains obscure. My answer to the question of how I feel about the prices of Kassay a couple of weeks back, I admit, was simply, “I have no idea who Jacob Kassay is?” And why should I? Unless you are a fair hopper or happen to know the program at Eleven Rivington in New York, why would you? Approaching the show at L&M, suddenly the thrust into the game of keeping up with a name that is racing out ahead of you, is ripe with peril, so stacked is the deck, so deep are the biases.

Depending on your temperament, you might enter the show with an expectation to either be disappointed or impressed, which is not a good stance in looking at art at all. If you are a struggling artist or even an established artist that took your time to get where you are, you could easily be offended by the quick price points. You might look for reasons outside the work for an explanation. If you are critic, you might have the temptation to gun for Kassay because the hype makes him a vulnerable target. If you are collector, you may want to see what the fuss is about, marveling at how last year’s speculation is suddenly this year’s pay off, ending in either coveting ownership or off-handedly dismissing the whole enterprise. All of the stances are weak positions and art goers should be above each of them.

All of these scenarios are so tempting, however, and I admit my reaction to seeing the show had a foot in each stance. However, what ultimately was more interesting was Kassay being bold enough to throw his hat into the ring of the monochrome, a now long, sometimes sordid, and often very distinguished history.

The monochrome, to me, is a test. They can mean nothing or everything, depending on your position and how you stand. They can be a testament to mystical faith, a stubborn reliance on material principles, an affirmation, a refusal. Sometimes they can be political, while other times they define themselves through being apolitical. What’s most interesting, however, is that most artists who employ monochromes are resolute in their practices and often very clear why they do what they do. You will probably disagree with me, but I don’t find the history of the monochrome to be all that enigmatic, though you would expect it to be the opposite. Think of Anne Truitt, Olivier Mosset, Alexander Rodchenko, Kasimir Malevich, Agnes Martin, Elsworth Kelly, and Mary Corse—these are not wishy-washy practices, they are straight ahead, consistent, and resolute.

In this ripe history, can we locate the young Kassay? I agree with the comparisons to Robert Ryman and Yves Klein, though at the moment it’s similar to putting the photos of two parents together and trying to project what the baby is going to look like in 20 years. There is a hint of Ryman’s deadpan interest in materials, his straightforward deployment of configurations. There is also a bit of Klein’s metaphor-making going on, chemical processes at an atomic level corresponding to the hum of music and the elegance of refinement. However, it is difficult to know where Kassay stands— maybe his interest is more in the pretty and the dainty, the cute and clean.

I get the impression that the center of L&M’s show, a large work on paper placed on rough 2 x 4 studs with a ballet barre positioned in front, is Kassay’s attempt at giving us what may be a position, although its orientation towards giving the show a conceptual reading also does a disservice. The work is ineffective, pitching a now typical rough D.I.Y look that is often misconstrued for sincerity and humility. Work like this is neither sincere nor humble, but instead uses tropes of sincerity and humility as a cop-out for rigorous thinking. I have to admit, that Kassay’s center piece looks grad-school and virtually destroys the mood of refinement and elegance created by the smaller works.

I can’t fault Kassay entirely for this. After all he is young, and perhaps the impulse is to bring a little resolution and a little art historical positioning to a practice that is probably more at home in explanation-less experimentation and straight ahead aesthetics. With the ballet barre, suddenly we are allowed to think of performance, of metaphor, of the history of Rauschenberg, his performative collaborations, and his white paintings, the idea of a monochrome as blank surfaces or "landing strips" for dust, light and shadow. All of this is fine and will probably be developed by Kassay in the future, but you get the impression that he is ahead of himself, as everyone is currently of him.

Despite work so centered, Kassay should be encouraged to slow down even more. There is rich material in his practice, principles to be unpacked, avenues bridging faith and reason, beauty and science, the human and the industrial, to be explored. Of course, we’ve been in these discussions many times and they are well trodden. Don’t look to Kassay for originality. However, what's wrong with a little quiet in a world that’s forgotten it, a little slowness in a world that’s too fast, a little refinement in the vulgar hum? I hope Kassay continues down his small paths with low-velocity steps. When the prices go up, when the prices go down, when people are looking, when people are not looking, when people take your picture, and when people don’t even want to find you, the slowness must be resolute, firm, and beautiful.

Piero Golia, Part Two

2011-07-25T08:07:00.000-07:00

The circumstances by which I took down my post on Piero Golia will remain between me and Piero. Some of my closer acquaintances know the story, but I am sure it is not very important. However, it is important that the post go back up in its entirely, which you can find by this link. The post records my honest impressions of Piero's show as I encountered it, and it is my freedom, especially in a free forum like a blog, to write whatever I want, as long as what I want is an honest, earnest inquiry done with an open heart.

I will take more of that freedom now.

I met Piero at Gagosian Gallery last Saturday and spoke with him for just under three hours. Piero had wanted to meet me on the roof, but the gallery was closed so we located our conversation in the shadowed corner of Gagosian's fire escape. I sat on the landing and Piero up on the steps. We were there with a purpose. I wanted to understand Piero's show and Piero wanted me to understand it as well.

We both felt like we were cheating. The critic should understand with the equipment of their mind and details of their experience. The artist's work should have already been done before the critic arrives, the hand of friendship already extended or the line in the sand drawn for all to see. In this case, however, Piero was certain he had done the work, and I was certain that I couldn't understand. Therefore, we were at an impasse.

The meeting, however, was fruitful. Perhaps it did not bring me to the point where I can appreciate Piero's show, actually I still have problems with it, but I was happy to have the conversation nonetheless. The difference between my expectations and initial reading of the show, and how Piero considers the show in the life of his work is definitely worth going into and giving a full critical airing. Piero did not like the terms I used initially, so now I seek to use his terms. The point of this new article is to distinguish Piero's terms from how I usually see art, to go out and meet his show at Gagosian according to those terms, and ultimately since I am a critic after all, to make a judgment on the efficacy of of how those terms were conveyed.

First the terms.

The most important thing that Piero and I discussed was the difference between what Piero calls “mannerism” and what is called “Scale 1.” Mannerism, so we came to agree, is using traditional forms of art, painting, sculpture, photography, film to create objects. One can approach perfection in Mannerism, a perfection that is astonishing. In thinking about this form of perfection, this ability to approach god through the perfection of a form, I admit I was delighted that Piero and I had the same favorites in Los Angeles, agreeing that in this form of approaching the perfection of a god, that Mark Grotjahn and Charles Ray were our best examples. We agreed that the work of both these artists struck us with awe and wonderment that human beings could take form to such a height. Piero did not come across as a death of painting type of person, though he acknowledged that the type of art he was interested in could not be achieved in the traditional forms, that its limitations held him at arms length from what he wanted. “When I see a Grotjahn,” Piero said, “there is just something about it that makes me want it.” In a great, well deserved tribute of Grotjahn's work, Piero said “It would take me 300 years to paint like Mark.”

Piero's idea of Mannerism begs refinement. When Piero says that it would take him 300 years to paint like Grotjahn, that is how long it would take him to get inside of the rich, deep layers of the form of painting, tease out a voice, establish ground in an area that is densely populated, and eventually go on to achieve greatness. Since everyone loves New York, we'll use it as a metaphor. I bet Piero would agree that to make ground in painting, sculpture, and in something like writing would be like starting as a squatter in a condemned building and working your way up to a penthouse in New York. You're still on Manhattan Island, you can't escape, but we can marvel at what you've done and what you've done is impressive.

Dave Hickey has a similar argument about painting, thinking that the form is all refinements and built edifices on top of things that have already been done. Many in arts share his view. I don't share the view, but I hope you see my point in laying it out. According to Piero, my original blog piece argued as if he were trying to make “good paintings” and “good sculptures,” and he is exactly right. I was arguing in just such a manner, my judgments fell accordingly, and you can read it for yourself. In the world of compositional and historical painting, the resin paintings do not work and according to Piero, they are not trying to work. In talking to people about the show, I found it comic that people read the resin paintings as paintings and still liked them. To me, after having a conversation with Piero, the fact that they liked them as paintings is akin to people that love that, from a certain viewpoint, a cloud looks like a Griffin. Piero was not trying to “compose” anything in the traditional manner. The aesthetics of the works, if you want to go there, is a happy accident.

What Piero wants, I came to find out, is instead, Scale 1, something he talks about a great deal with artists that he considers kindred spirits, namely Rirkrit Tiravanija and Pierre Huyghe. Art at Scale 1 exists in reality, at the scale of life itself. Please don't conjure the term “relational aesthetics,” for it simply misleading. Instead, what Piero talks about is a certain gesture inside of life that makes reality itself do something (the something is determined by the artist). The gesture would have a certain snowball effect, reality would contract, expand, be enriched, be any qualifier you would like to imagine. This is the stuff of Piero's art. “I'm not interested anymore if it's art or film or law or whatever,” as Piero related in his Desert Interviews to Pierre Huyghe, “as long as it's astonishing.”

To go back to our New York metaphor, Scale 1 could not be measured inside the systems and conditions that determine success inside the real estate cage match of Manhattan, but would rather be something that changes those games entirely. I thought of immediately of Rem Koolhaus and OMA, architecture that proposes tectonic changes of reality. Don't squat and move up. Instead, turn Manhattan's grid 45 degrees. Don't triumph by achieving your brownstone, instead put a roof over the entire island and heat it and cool it by solar panels. In other words, think big, If you don't have the money to think big, think of the little pressure points that achieve maximum momentum through small applications of force. This, I think, is Piero Golia. These are what I consider to be, in the wake of my conversation with him, his terms. “What I am interested in is the equation that is so exponentially high that a butterfly flapping its wings creates a tornado,” Piero says again in the Desert Interviews, “Just a little change can expand so much. I believe all art is in that gap between the starting point and the end point.”

In other words, Piero is in the business of the gods. Scale 1 is the vantage point of divinity. You don't go by the usual terms because the terms themselves are what is being dictated. There is a reason in the mythological universe that the god Hephaestus has a lame leg. He is the god of craft, of mannerist art, of the tools of man. His works, though godly and amazing, are, in the end, lame in the face of the business of the Olympus, from which he is kicked off. He is strapped to the physical and the physical is only deformity.

I asked Piero whether, in the face of Hephaestus, he was doing the business of Zeus with his show at Gagosian. His answer was no, that he was instead in the business of Mars (I loved that Piero uses the Roman names, though Mars will always be Ares to me).

“The god of war,” I said in reaction.

“Yes,” Piero said, “and the god of cows.”
(Correction: Piero is misquoted here. He actually said "Chaos" instead of cows. Since Mars is the god of agriculture in the Roman canon, I did not catch my mishearing. For this I apologize.)

More importantly, I'd say, the god of strategy. As in war and in farming, Piero's terms are about thinking ahead, moving pieces of reality, to produce something in the present that opens into the future. Even more so, it about something small becoming powerful in its poignancy. I think of the Bible and the incident where Jesus comes upon a boy inhabited by a demon and the disciples wonder why they are not successful in driving out the demons themselves. “Because you have little faith,” Jesus says, “if you have faith the size of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move.'” Piero, to me, seems to say that art needs get back to its mountain moving roots.

Piero believes in the power of the artistic gesture and he sees this power inside of real life as Duchamp's ultimate lesson. It is not a matter of moving the pieces of reality into different configurations that makes art Scale 1, but instead knowing the forces by which the pieces move and get involved with those forces. This is art as its most ambitious and also at its most dangerous. Failure, in the face of attempting godliness, is expected. Success should be treasured.

So what are some of these forces, if I am to believe Piero's terms, in the show at Gagosian? We see the resin paintings, we see the cake molds filling up the center space. You've already read what I thought of these works according to the usual terms, but now let's think about the show according to Piero's terms.

One problem that Piero had with my initial review were the things that it didn't know. For instance, the review did not know that Piero issued an announcement for the show on Facebook before he had a venue, that Piero had set a date for the show, June 23^rd, before any gallerist agreed to show the work. Also, the review didn't know that Gagosian did not give Piero the back gallery to relegate him to a small space, but because Piero asked for the space. Piero chose the gallery. To add up another failing, the review did not know that the personal nature of the molds and the pieces of the taxi wreckage inside the resin paintings are less about something personal, in other words not precious as a matter of biography, but instead are simply the stuff of Piero's life, the stuff which art uses to make a gesture. Furthermore, the review did not give an account of the opening, which apparently was a large part of the piece itself.

From Piero's vantage point and the vantage point of Andrew Berardini's review in the L.A. Weekly, which gives a good overview of Piero's career and how this work fits into it, Piero gave us a gesture at Gagosian that needed all of those details. He quite literally filled the “mold” of an “art show.” This is not art show as ready made, but instead Piero inside the forces which control how art is made. A show, for instance, was not “bestowed” by a gallery and then the artist makes the work. Instead, the conditions of the show are set, without any of the gallery's market dictates, and the conditions are then played out in a real setting, set by the artist.

The show has objects, but it is the reality of the artist/gallery relationship, the dynamics of power inside that system, that Piero is re-orienting and challenging. To clarify, Piero said that if he ever made another resin painting in that manner or another cake mold to sell, that I could immediately call him a fraud (I'm watching closely, and you better believe I will). The objects are only part of a larger artwork and they cannot be placed in isolation for the larger artwork. Piero, in the manner of Sol Lewitt, (as Berardini wrote and Piero told me) set conditions as a machine for art, but the machine for art is not about objects but about the entire system by which art is made, displayed, and through which value is conferred.

I pray that I finally have Piero's terms. If I do not, nothing can be done, and I am sorry, I am simply confused then and cannot be helped. Set me out to pasture and let Ares deal with me. I hope that I now know the terms because I mentioned that making art in Scale 1 is dangerous, and it certainly is, and I really want to get to the serious part of the discussion, why such things are dangerous and whether or not Piero's show is satisfying in a Scale 1 manner.

First of all, I do not apologize for missing Piero's terms on my first viewing. The business of gods should make itself known and I did the amount of work I usually do in reviewing a show. For one need not believe in God, know anything about God, to know you are in an earthquake. Furthermore, you need not believe in a creator, or know any back story, to be charmed by a falling leaf. One should not have to be a friend of Piero or in a small facebook community to see the fullness of a gesture. One should simply be astonished, and to be honest, I just wasn't.

I think the reason I was not astonished is I don't find the artist/gallery relationship, the system and terms by which value is conferred and the usual trinity of artist,art,gallery to be interesting at all. If Piero's gesture is aimed at opening an fissure of infinity inside of the infuriating, alienating system of the artworld, then it fails in ambition. It fails in ambition not because of its lack of execution or intelligence or even the efficacy of its abilities, but because the artworld, in and of itself, is a small matter. The whole enterprise reminds me of a conversation I once had with a collector about how much money a Sotheby's auction made. She was impressed, astonished even. I, however, was not astonished. I was instead trapped inside a scale of my own life, having read just that day in Bob Woodward's “Bush at War” that the same amount of money is spent in Afganistan to keep a special ops team, at work, for only six weeks. In the face of real power, the artworld is a self-contained parlor game.

Perhaps the people at the opening would have been astonished by the achievement that Piero realized in the artworld, that he changed the terms of the game, Mars blessing a harvest, leading the cows into a different field, or changing the battleground for artists. Believe me, it is an achievement. If you think it is easy to announce a show on Facebook and then have Gagosian fill it, you are wrong. Piero did do an impressive thing inside of the small system of the artworld.

For a person that is not an artist, however, that cares little for those systems, that has seen Piero using Scale 1 in more global ways, it comes across as a gesture re-orienting a system that is far, far too full of itself and almost paltry in relation to the wider world (to clarify, I mean the artworld is too full of itself and not Piero). It almost seems beneath Piero to mess with the artworld, to have to do an “art show” at all. He's been in bigger territory, planted more expansive gardens. I guess what I am saying is that when you start messing with scale, start making distinctions between mannerism and Scale 1, that to then turn and do a piece inside of system of the artworld is a bit of deflation. The question remains and I've racked my brain about it, simply Why did Piero Golia do an art show? Why attempt Scale 1 inside the gallery system when the gallery system is so small and so disappointing in every way? (if you are reading this and insert a cynical answer here, shame on you).

It could, however, be argued that perhaps this show was his goodbye to such small things, that this show was meant for the insular community of the artworld to show the absurdity of its smallness, that the gesture of posting his invite on Facebook was the punchline to the joke that Facebook is perhaps proper metaphor for how the artworld works, that the artworld is a place arrogant enough to see Jerry Saltz's wall as proper discourse or arrogant enough to think that a gesture on Piero's wall (for his limited number of friends) could have the reach to lead a person in the present or the future to be astonished by the gesture he makes in a gallery. From this angle, I can almost see it. If that was the purpose, well, you've got to do what you've got to do, swat the fly if it is in your face.

I am grateful for my conversation with Piero. I am not a god. I have no place on Olympus. I am not on the list at the magic castle. When Piero says, jokingly, to Pierre Huyghe, “To me, it's like a magician – only another magician knows how good you are at making a ball hover on its own. For the normal public, it's just a ball hovering,” I am glad I had the opportunity to ask the magician a few questions. The only problem with the Gagosian show for me was that for me the ball doesn't hover. Though I may be surrounded by people all saying the ball is hovering (though some, in private, say that they too do not see the ball hovering), I have to square with the fact that the ball is not hovering for me. It is possible that I just don't get it (very possible), but it is also possible that there is something weak going on here, a game of shadows, a shell game that doesn't need me, the viewer, to be played.

Piero Golia

2011-07-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

Piero Golia: Concrete Cakes and Constellation Paintings
Gagosian, Beverly Hills
Through August 5^th

I want to hold Piero Golia to his word, if not for any other reason than he says dazzling things. I had the pleasure of sitting with him on a panel once. The crowd was in a bad mood. We had a number of very bitter folks present, complaining about the artmarket, about artists that have the money for monumental studios, about the funding that bad artists get for unimpressive public projects, about the cool kid clubs that exist in every art community.

Golia's response to these complaints was blunt, solid, and memorable. Basically, to paraphrase, he said for these people to stop complaining -- great artists make great art, he said, whether they have one square foot and three dollars or 20,000 square foot and a million. It is not the conditions stacked against these artists that made them mediocre, they were mediocre by essence.

I loved the answer, and it was one of many things I heard from Golia that afternoon. Another gem was in relation to the people complaining about public art. “There's a difference,” Golia said,” between public art and art in public.” He was exactly right. Every obscure billboard you see with an artist's work on it, every lame sculpture propped up in a park -- this is art in public and not public art. The art is made for somewhere else (galleries, museums), and its current location doesn't matter and neither does the public.

The final Golia thought from that day I remember was to the question: “Why do you live in Los Angeles?.” His response, simply, “Because it is close to Las Vegas and Los Alamos.” Now, for me, that response is the right mix of zany and smart to make me perk up and notice this small in stature but long in ideas Italian.

Others have noticed as well. Golia has taken on a sort of darling status. He is talked about at parties, he is slowly turned in a legend in private, I am confident that he could take on the status of myth at some point. Here is a man that, having nothing to do with Hollywood or the glamour machine, placed a light on the top of the Standard Hotel. In one of the vainest towns in the world, there's a light on top of one of the most beloved hotels not telling us when Britney or Lindsey or Brad are in town, but instead, when Golia is present. Here is a man who proposed, along with Halliburton, a border fence proposal to the U.S. Government trying to solve the problem of illegal crossings with an interlocking fence of Richard Serra sculptures complete with doors opening at random times.

Epic ideas require epic payoffs, and Golia has us all tuned to expect greatness from him. It is a necessary condition after his compressed bus piece, his attempts to get funding to build an actual barrier between Los Angeles and Orange County, after his service as, apparently from all accounts, a great teacher at the unconventional Mountain School. We expect quite a bit from Golia.

Now if you've read my criticism before, you probably know what's coming. When I start off praising, there is usually a catch, and about that, you are quite right. With all that I've said about Golia, all my expectations for him and all my faith in his abilities, I absolutely must call out and describe my disappointment with his Gagosian Beverly Hills show, a presentation that is smart, perhaps even slightly above average, but in the end the type of safe, innocuous, and forgettable work that we usually get from artists not named Golia.

There exhibition can be divided in two. First, there are rows of pedestals, arranged in a rigorous grid, with multiple concrete casts of cake pans (all different) sitting on top of them. Second, there are a number of black poured paintings, locking in the remains of an incident where a cab crashed into Golia's house, destroying many of his belongings and some of his art.

Both of these works are smart. The concrete cakes are fascinating from several angles. The pedestals are high enough and the concrete white enough to allude to busts of ancient cultures, the brooding visages of great men that lined the halls of Rome. At the same time, the diversity of the cake pans and their pre-fabricated forms recall the arrangements of Donald Judd. The cake pans, we learn, are gifts to Golia from his friends. They have all of the good features of Judd – changing vistas, interesting configurations, solid practical existences – but they also have what Judd lacks – personal history, memory, biographical details. It is a solid piece, smart straightforward conceptualism that has something to say about life and about art history.

The second piece attempts a similar thing, except this time not quite so elegantly. Recalling more than anything Mike Kelley's Memory Ware project, Golia's constellation paintings rebuild and retool as art the unexpected and completely odd event of the cab crash. Like Kelley dragged the Detroit River looking for mementos tossed into the depths both strange and ordinary to use in resin paintings, Golia too embeds the detritus of history, his personal history, into a two dimensional platform. As paintings, they are unremarkable, sort of bad Alberto Burris or Tom Friedmans that don't wink at you. As a concept, they are not quite as strong as the concrete cakes. They less sure of themselves, a bit forced.

Throughout viewing Golia's exhibition, I kept thinking of all the reasons that I was disappointed, of the fine line between expectations and the financial and physical ability (according to conditions) of an artist to live up to their dreams. I thought perhaps it was a Gagosian problem. Golia had the smallest gallery in the house and was limited in what he could do. Perhaps it was a money problem. Perhaps it was a Golia problem, perhaps the myth outgrows the man at the moment. It is difficult to know.

What I do know, however, is that I agree with Golia that great artists make great art whether they have one square foot and three dollars or 20,000 square foot and a million. I also think that in terms of the Gagosian show that Golia can probably do better, as smart as aspects of the work may be. Ultimately, this presentation is an artist still struggling for a voice. I love Golia's public voice, I love his quips, his whit, and his excitement. Here's to a long future that is still, at this point, in the future.

Paul Thek

2011-07-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

Paul Thek
Hammer Museum
Through August 28, 2011

(Reprinted from ArtSlant.com)

Paul Thek believed in a soul. More essentially to his particular pain, he believed in its transience. Part of the brutality and genuine emotion of Thek’s work was that the soul’s peril, its ability to lose a handle on itself, was often more palpable for Thek than soul’s ability to transcend its condition. There are glimpses, premonitions, flourishes, passing brushes of air which tempt hope, but Thek’s soul (his animus, his central compelling force) most often appears as something under attack, something fragile and buffeted by the forces of Thek’s age, the wages of mortality, and the contradictions of his own heart.

While on one hand, his soul seemed to take losses through the popular art around him, namely Pop and Minimalism, more critically his soul was divided against itself, lost in its own contradictions. He may have truly lived, this Paul Thek, but he certainly suffered. That is the lesson of his soul and his exhibit. There are few causes to rejoice during a viewing of it, not because it is bad (actually, aspects are quite arresting) but because it is a mirror for a troubled spirit, a beautiful and wispy lost boy. It is hard to look at, and letting it inside is even more painful.

In explaining myself, in getting into the details of those last loaded paragraphs, it is best to start with the beautiful boy. That’s where the exhibition starts. Thek is fetishized, both for his outsider status (apparently he was in the right crowds but didn’t want to play) and his appearance. In recent exhibitions, for instance, of other marginalized but important figures like Lynda Benglis or Dan Graham, for instance, there was no need to flood viewers with their visage, but that is exactly what we get with Thek. Peter Hujar’s documentation is very present. The first art we encounter is not Thek, but Warhol focused on Thek, his beautiful blond hair not yet long, full of wonder and dewily beautiful. The exhibition flyers have Thek on Fire Island strumming a guitar offering the camera a crushing glare, bent and vulnerable, as if the shack around him was about to fall around him while he plays one last ballad to his lover. Thek’s image is so pervasive, I began to suspect that it might actually be the curatorial point (very sad, I think).

These images seem both important and slightly misleading, tempting one to do what we shouldn’t with an artist, to romanticize them for things about them we think we know about them rather than things that are real and firm. The Thek exhibit is full of all sorts of traps of this nature, and one is inclined to wonder whether Thek’s beauty, his fundamental gift of body and face, partially led to the bombardment of that soul he believed in. It certainly won him some advantages, advantages that he mostly spurned from most accounts, but his face lingering above the exhibition definitely threatens to misplace the seriousness of his work, a work decidedly below the surface, so firm in its belief in an inner reality of the soul as to make something like a beautiful face nothing more than a mask, a false signifier.

I don’t know where I heard it, but it was said that Warhol ranked Thek among the top 13 most beautiful boys in New York. This is typical Warhol, in his horrid world of celebrities and rankings, his efforts to delineate and separate his superstars, a circus of attribution of which he was the ringmaster. Pop is a quantifier, a packager, it worships the new and there is little place for the old. While Warhol was a tortured Catholic like Thek, he was at least early on a believer in essences and spirit, pop as a culture engine does not allow for such things. For the fairest in the land (for someone like Thek, someone like Edie Sedgwick), it is a two-headed beast bringing glory and destruction, a consumability that has to be sought through simplification.

Pop doesn’t know. Pop enlarges, projects, assumes, and eats. No wonder one of the earliest, most heartening of Thek gestures is tipping a Warhol Brillo Box and stuffing it with a wax effigy of rotting meat (not included at the Hammer). It is an angry, resistant act (much Thek’s work has at least one foot in either anger, frustration, or confusion and sometimes all three), perhaps aimed at Pop’s original sin—its reliance on surface, its avoidance of what’s hidden, that it lives in the shallow end of the pool. Most hatefully, Pop turns spirit into something cheap.

If the soul is buried, if it is deep, then Thek was under attack from forces like Pop. Thek, the “Diver,” was fighting like hell to avoid a monumental loss, the loss of depth to surface. You’ll find not one clean, processed, or tight image in Thek’s work. How could he? Those images were an enemy.

Then, there is the issue of Minimalism, also very present in the show. I am not convinced Thek interpreted Minimalism correctly, but he believed that it too brought monumental losses in the Humanistic war for the survival of the old soul. I got the impression at the Hammer, for instance, that Thek may have thought of something like industrialism or even corporate culture when thinking of the reductive art of his time (he may even have conflated Pop with Minimalism, seeing one as a function of the other). It was the corporation, the glass pyramids of the capitalist global shredder that seemed to oppress Thek. I can’t help but think the corporate, for instance, may be a cause for his thoughts of Egypt—kings on the backs of slaves, great achievements built on the imposed squalor of lesser mortals. Is it the corporate that locks a rotting, pulsing corpse inside clean lines and fabricated levity? While someone like Judd or Flavin thought they were trying to ground the idea of the human in something straightforward, practical, and potentially beautiful, Thek seemed to see a number of cube and ruler-wielding, theory-driven, Joshuas surrounding the crumbling wall of his romantic, spiritual, and mystical self.

So naturally, I don’t agree with Christopher Knight’s assessment: “So the sculptures don't make a reactionary case for ‘interior authenticity’ as a missing ingredient in new and supposedly soulless '60s art. Instead they embody the fraudulence of the concept of essential spirit, however much it's extolled in popular conceptions of art.” In my mind, any person with even the remote desire (not to mention to ability to apply several times in an earnestness attempt) to join a contemplative monastery has to believe in the concept of essential spirit. Thek, its true, expressed a hope that monks would eventually leave their cells and join the world as preachers, but that does not nullify what I think was his true belief in his own interior integrity and status as bearer of some sort of spirit. That perceived integrity made him an odd man out, a bitter pill, the type of artist that is respected by artists but not understood by collectors.

However, the art of Thek’s time, those items and ideas floating around the galleries of New York and Europe of Thek’s age, can easily be overstated in their importance, as they so often are in the stories of artist’s lives and in the fraudulence and hyperbole of art historical writing. It was not Warhol and Judd that was oppressing Thek. It was Thek, the fishman tethered and caught in a tree like the maidens with the golden hair in Segantini paintings. There was something fundamentally philosophically strapped and burdened in Thek and this something is way past art into something deeper, into the Catholicism of his upbringing, a Catholicism that he wanted to embrace.

Why, for instance, do his childlike and somewhat naïve paintings threaten to float away, barely clinging to high art at all, as if jotted in the notebook over a creative, suffering child? Susan lecturing on Neitzsche, 1987, holds none of the authority of the lecture, none of the didacticism of Sontag—it is a painting perhaps by someone too tired to listen or even more probable, someone that knew Susan’s flaws too well to see her lecture for anything more than earnestness, as human effort playing against a obscure and turbulent backdrop. One writer put it really well in thinking the painting was “I’m still here and ready to reconcile letter” to Sontag, a note in paint.

The most poignant painting for me occurs in the Hammer’s final gallery, a quickly sketched jail cell, bars bent and occupant presumably released into the sky. A fantasy, a wish, a gesture towards the divine, this painting finds a complement in the work of Robert Gober, a practice with much of the same troubles as Thek’s work. Both artists find transcendence caught up in the physical, a bodily and mortal state encumbering the spirit or soul. Mixed with morality, this can lead to guilt. Mixed with science, it can lead to doubt. However, this fact is painfully present in Thek’s work. The fact that the spirit-matter split matters, that is something still worthy of facing, is something I find in Thek. The Word becoming flesh becoming spirit becoming flesh, the mystery of a Catholic union between the human and divine, seems dream worth having to Thek, even if it is a dream difficult to believe in.

Beauty CULTure

2011-07-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

Beauty CULTure
Annenberg Space for Photography
Through November 27, 2011

(Reprinted fromArtSlant.com)

A couple of years back, the New Yorker ran a profile of a person who is usually hidden from the public but who perhaps has a wider handle and power on how we see than any artist or optometrist. He is the best in the world, sought after by both artists like Philip-Lorca DiCorcia as well as almost every high profile magazine, and his job is a simple one, to make people look “better,” more beautiful by tweaking the tragedy of the image that was actually captured by the camera.

It is Pascal Dangin’s job to airbrush, tweak, and often rebuild photographs according to what society needs at the moment, whatever its current idea of beauty is. If society trends toward slender slips like Kate Moss as it did in parts of the 90s, Dangin can do it. If it wants curvy and robust like Kim Kardashian, Dangin can do that too. Most shocking to me, however, was that Dangin even caught on to the point a few years ago that society was critiquing its images and that critique itself was the vogue. Remember the Dove Real Women campaign -- well Dangin did one as well; “It was a great job, a challenge,” Dangin said, “to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Dangin is the instrument and perfect of embodiment of what Susan Sontag called The Image World, which is notably the idea that real social change is masked by the illusion of its changing images. Essentially, we watch the little amendments and slight shifts in the ethics of our images and this gives us simulation and release from boredom. Sontag, ever intent to get political, goes on to say that The Image World naturally facilitates and augments the harsher realities of Capitalism, photographs “a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology.”

The loose and hard-to-define concept of Beauty is, of course, a central part of The Image World. Beauty is able to be chased, but unable to be grasped. Beauty is open to as many subjective definitions than there are subjects, but more often, is rote and predictable in hands of unimaginative minds and limited vision. Beauty as a concept is perfect for the world of the photograph. Dangin, for instance, seems to sense what society wants from Beauty at a given time according to archetypes which constantly emerge and fade from view. The truism “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is incorrect according to Sontag. Instead, Beauty is in the eye of people like Dangin, in the eye of the ruling class, in the eye of what the ruling class wants to look like and wants to sell. “At one end of the spectrum, photographs are objective data; at the other end, they are items of psychological science fiction,” is how Sontag put it.

Now when I encounter a show in Los Angeles, that engine of beauty and glamour and all things painted and polished, called Beauty Culture, I would expect a show that gets into some of these issues of constructed beauty. I would expect the show to analyze and critique, to get into the ethics of this culture. I would expect the show to even have the ambition to suggest, as Sontag goes on to, that images are not the whole story, that humans have the freedom -- should they recognize their dilemma and choose to do so -- to rebel from images. These, for me quite reasonable, expectations were the reason I was so disappointed and even saddened by Beauty Culture at The Annenberg Center of Photography.

Beauty Culture, on view for the entirety of the summer, would have been an opportunity to get some real work done for Los Angeles in terms of photography, but the show seems to have wandered into pretty vapid territory instead, basically prints arranged in the following categories – What color is beauty?, the Pinup, The Marilyn Syndrome, The Hollywood Glamour Machine, Beauty Incorporated (don’t really see the difference between this and the glamour machine), and finally a solid wall of fashion magazine covers. If the intention was to examine the role of photography in the presentation and often construction of beauty, to expose it as it does in its title as rooted in “Cult” thinking, then what we have here is the very narrow and facile idea of beauty that we find pretty much everywhere. Thumb through an issue of W or Vanity Fair, and you have most of what you will find at the Annenberg.

Basically what I mean by “narrow and facile idea of beauty” is beauty as an image, as a surface built by a culture that has a large, often financial, stake in what those images look like. We often have the experience, especially in Los Angeles, of hearing in regard to celebrities and others that “they look just like their picture” if they are beautiful, or the opposite if we think they are not living up to our expectations, “they are much less pretty in person.” The world of the constructed image is a fascinating but dangerous place, prone to the whims and impulses of a schizoid and distracted culture, but most of the images shown at the Annenberg are simply the polished, final, unflinching, and dangerous images that are so destructive to culture. We only have people looking good in their photographs and most often (almost two thirds of the time) women photographed and interpreted by men.

It is not enough to throw in diversity of skin color, a few images of plastic surgery, and a Martin Schoeller image of Tammy Faye Baker, of constructed beauty falling off the deep end. These images, though showing some of the darker avenues of constructed beauty, still show the engine pumping and unable to be stopped. They are greatly outweighed by the hundreds of straight ahead fashion photos of Marilyn, Kirsten Dunst (who, I would say from experience in L.A., does not look like her photos), Sofia Loren, and Angelina Jolie. The Annenberg’s main role with this exhibition is to show the same unapologetic falsities that are built by CAA in the same building, and this is a real shame.

Instead, what of that freedom that Sontag talked about, about the choice one can enact for themselves to resist the image world and see it for what it is, an illusion? Are there not any routes we can take in photography to see its ruses? How about at least one instance of a retouched photo next to an untouched one, a sort of Highlights Magazine, can-you-see-what’s-different moment? Are there ways to include photographers that have perhaps unconventional visions of beauty? Is there a way to show that beauty is not entirely in the hands of the image? Are there limitations to beauty as given by photography? At bare minimum, how about bringing some of the famous critiques of fashion body image as offered by feminist psychology, sociology, and art history over last forty years? Eleanor Antin? Naomi Wolf? These would be the questions that a serious exhibition on the cult of beauty must ask.

The Annenberg Center of Photography has great potential, having the luxury of focusing specifically on the photo medium when most museums put photography in the basement, in a remote wing, or in side altar gallery spaces. Institutions dedicated solely to photography can add depth to an art community. One thinks immediately of the International Center of Photography and the Aperture Foundation in New York as well as the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago as serious places dedicated to the theory, presentation, and history of photography. Not only that, they do great jobs, have interesting shows, and really push the envelope, able to, at times, even to push forward questions about the often shaky moral ground photography stands on.

Los Angeles needs a place like these, and The Annenberg seems to have this interest in mind, but this show is not a good route. They can do better than this. During a time when Los Angeles is collectively making a claim as not only a world class art city but as the world class art city, we need them to do better than this.

Cy Twombly, R.I.P

2011-07-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

Cy Twombly died today at the age of 83 in Rome. I call it ORANGES obit forthcoming.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/cy-twombly-idiosyncratic-painter-dies-at-83/

Julian Hoeber in Art Review

2011-05-27T10:02:00.000-07:00

Julian Hoeber
Blum and Poe
Closed March 12, 2011

In the May, 2011 issue of Art Review, I invite you to read my review of Julian Hoeber at Blum and Poe. This is a link to the article online.

Thanks for Reading

Eberhard Havekost

2011-04-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

Eberhard Havekost

Roberts and Tilton

Through April 2, 2011

(Reprinted from ArtSlant.com)

Eberhard Havekost’s paintings are blurry. This simple fact is what makes the painting complicated. Something has to precede the act of blurring. Even his most color stroked works can’t help but suggest they come from somewhere, from a photograph, from a landscape, from an image of some sort. For this reason, some commentators refer to Havekost’s paintings as spectral, as haunted, inhabited by spirits and ghosts. We don’t know the ghosts but we suspect their presence. Other commentators prefer the idea that his works are paintings that don’t want to represent, that play on the idea of painting’s ultimate failure to provide any firm reality, that work the gap between what is and what is speakable and knowable. Whatever your orientation in the debate (I promise I take a firm stand in this myself), something is blurred and that something, though displaced and removed from us through the blurring, is quietly present in every Havekost exhibition.

His show at Roberts and Tilton, Take Care, presents such blur and mostly the source images can be easily recognized—Spiderman, a television, vegetation, two horizons, a rucksack, ice, and a couple of disturbed screaming figures. One work is incredibly close to losing the sense of a source image entirely, Wand B09/10, 2009-10. However, the title and extended viewing brings it back into the world of images, it is a Rorschach of sorts, almost symmetrical but slightly distorted, ultimately a strange register (currently it thwarts my attempts at understanding it as image). All the paintings are painted in flat, muted tones or hazes of quick color, painted wet on wet. Barry Schwabsky’s term for Havekost’s work is correct, they are “sluggish.” That’s what we have here, delayed gratification, sober renderings. The paint, chalky and matte, runs as easily as cold molasses.

The work has many hip, “straight from the contemporary art playbook” moments. The overall diversity of the imagery does not lend itself to any narrative (story telling or historical coherence), placing both the political (which needs a social entry point) and the personal at arm’s length. The Spiderman image, Solitude B09/10, 2009-2010 makes use of the lost profile (or when a face is turned from the viewer as to not give you access to any of the subject's “inner life”). The lost profile is considered a hallmark of post-war portraiture, where apparently we’ve lost faith in the ability of a portrait to reveal much of anything about a subject (see Gerhard Richter’s Betty, 1988).

This lost profile function is played out in even more dramatic fashion in the three panel work, Flatscreen 2 (1,2,3), B10, 2010. This analytic yet elusive approach to a blank television (which again gives us nothing of its inner life or purpose) is like the functional approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher in their early serials, giving us a rational look at an exterior without a story, mixed with the haphazard work of someone like Wolfgang Tillmans in his Concord series, which finds a plane moving quickly across the sky, able to be glimpsed but not captured.

Perhaps the most abstract works in the show, Horizont 1, B11, 2011, and Eis (Ice), B11, 2011, give us the overall theme: we think we see something; we try to make it out, but ultimately any attribution of meaning or cultural positioning to the blurred image is speculation and projection by the viewer. Writers are fond of quoting Duchamp’s “The spectator makes the picture” when faced with Havekost work, and rightly so—you can certainly see these works as the flotsam of an over-mediated culture, an overly cropped, positioned, strategized, and interpreted society that is more uncertain of its own meaning and story as ever. Havekost redeploys (another hip term) the flotsam as representations of us, of us that cannot represent much of any truth other than our failure to find coherence in a troubling world. In failing to represent, he shows representation’s doom of continual failure.

There should be a crisis here and, for me, there certainly is a crisis to be seen in Havekost’s work. Perhaps more than the two painters he is continuously compared to, Luc Tuymans and Richter, Havekost has journeyed to the edge of a culture where the explosion of imagery in of all different formats and media has led only to the destruction of the image’s power to carry a message, to issue a sting of reality to the viewer, to call forth a specter of lived experience.

The reason why Eberhard Havekost is farther towards doom than Tuymans or Richter is he does not allow as many touchstones, as many meaningful breaths of meaning in the swirling turbulent ocean of broken images. In Richter’s Atlas of photographs, for instance, we find the personal and the political mixed with the banal (and the same goes in Tuymans’ canon of imagery as well). To extend the issue to photography, even Thomas Ruff, that priest of the particulars of how photography carries meaning and then carries meaning away, finds a strange human animation in his jpeg series.

Though similar in effect to all of his other painted black and white photograph interventions, Richter’s Uncle Rudi, 1965, for example, has just enough symbolic registers (that uniform, the cocked hat) to complete a number of humanist goals—the reanimation of repressed history, the acknowledgment of a terrible truth, the ability to get at real historical meaning through art, accomplishing what neither the photograph nor a straightforward representation of the photograph could have done on its own.

Similar truths, strangely, come forth in the obscured and minimal paintings of Tuymans of horrible moments in the history of Belgian Colonialism or America under Bush; he even can find truths in a corporate boardroom. Finally Ruff, perhaps the closest to the world of Havekost overall, finds in his jpeg series, a moment where enlargement in the photo studio of low-grade internet images can lead to strangely reanimated content of desensitized images of 9-11 and the bombing of Bagdad. Through not initially knowing what we are looking at and working to discover what we see, we remember things and events that were lost. Real events. Real transmission. It isn’t perfect one-to-one, representation = everything, but it serves a good function.

Havekost, on the other hand, leaves me troubled and adrift, without an anchor in world of flooding images. The specters that some commentators detect, for me, come without bodies and without names, like the afterglow of an image that I did not quite see. The noble failure that other commentators detect is not, in the end, noble enough for me. Havekost is a different painter from Richter and Tuymans, absolutely a singular voice, but he is not necessarily a voice I enjoy dwelling upon.

However, I cannot entirely say this with a straight face. There is Spiderman, Solitude B09/10.

This beloved character, a superhero, stands, cropped at the knees, bent forward as if examining something, the stark whiteness of the background giving forth no information. Spiderman is a spectacle figure, a pop icon, a character with an entirely known mythology. He is Peter Parker. He’s an enigma. He is both.

Havekost, in brilliant fashion, gives us an image of a pop figure that is decidedly not pop—this is no Warhol Superman, this is no Polke broken screen. Spiderman is not allowed glory yet he is not allowed disgrace either, he just stands somewhere between the known and the disguised. The painting itself, how it is employed, its coyness, its pale shyness, is an unusual metaphor for such a recognizable pop figure. The touchstone here, a known entity of culture, is thus reanimated in a new and unusual way. This is a good painting.

Thomas Houseago

2011-02-14T13:29:00.000-08:00

Thomas Houseago
L&M Arts
Through March 5, 2011

(Reprinted from ArtSlant.com)

When it comes to the many young Los Angeles artists that engage very specific modernist masters amongst a litany of popular associations, I am considering the possibility that despite all of their witty references, their contemporary posturing, and in general, their fast talking when it comes to art, it is best to start with a simple question: do these artists live up (on a formal, physical level) to the artists they think about? Does a Mark Grotjahn painting hold a wall as well as a Jasper Johns Crosshatch painting? Do Aaron Curry’s sculptures, intent on offering thrills beyond Alexander Calder based in the flow of contemporary information, actually offer those thrills, is he as good a sculptor as Calder even on Calder’s worst day? Does a Sterling Ruby defaced plinth out-achieve Robert Morris in its critique, or does it use Morris as a visual crutch? To put it bluntly, which would you rather have in the room and which is deeper, a Marküs Lupertz sculpture or a Thomas Houseago?

I’ve asked this question before. Surely it is fair—in an artworld that has critically considered questions about its own demise and about the possibility that everything has been done, in an artworld where if one can’t achieve virtuosity of form on one’s own, there are brilliant fabricators that can achieve it—to make an old fashioned formal comparison between the old and the new? Houseago, for instance, can sing you a Beatle’s tune, use Picasso and Hanna Barbera in the same sentence, can talk about why Mike Kelley is important and has a firm place in art history, and then turn around and say that history is not fixed, that “no act or decision is more necessary or absurd” than any other act or decision. In this gush of information and statements, can Houseago make a sculpture as well as his teacher Thomas Schütte?

The answer is yes, sometimes.

I find Houseago's work both better than I expect at times (actually sometimes quite dazzling) and at other times, literally epically disappointing. He should take heart, only a great talent can epically disappoint. Someone with meager talents can’t epically do anything. He should take even more heart. I think if he gets where he is going, Houseago could be quite astonishing.

Currently, Rattlesnake Figure (Carving), 2010, is Houseago at his best. This hunk of redwood, as Leah Ollman correctly observed in the Times, has “the latent energy of Michelangelo’s slaves.” However, I am finding that I can go much further. Houseago pairs Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, 1513-1516 with German Expressionist wood carving (which Ollman also mentions). This is no mere happenstance. The Platonism that drove Michelangelo, his belief that a figure resides in the rock, that its very essence is part of the rock whether or not Michelangelo released it, directly communicates with the Romanticism that drove many Germans up to Baselitz and Balkenhol. The mysticism of the German forest implies its ability to whisper primal secrets into the ear of a hiker or a philosopher on a walk. That a forest can take on a archetype or mythological persona that could drive sculpture, does not seem to be lost on Houseago. These are two very different and quite complicated visions of sculptural essence, and Houseago finds both, Platonic and Romantic, in the same piece of wood.

Houseago likes to unify different visions, but rarely does he do it as seamlessly as he does in Rattlesnake Figure. What’s even more impressive is that this isn’t the entire story of this piece. When encountering the work, I challenge the viewer to determine the back of the sculpture from the front. After close looking, I failed in my attempt. Glutes easily turn into thigh muscles, the directional force of the legs and body is difficult to determine, the face carving and drawing is a collection of mis-directions and false clues. Here we have a Picasso/Rodin shattering of figuration, a sculpture that is a whole figure with a take on sculptural essence in a traditional sense, yet a work that cannot be pinned down as an “image” or embodiment of any one thing. Even as Houseago invokes the Germans and Renaissance Platonists, he undermines them. He shows he is a Picasso man at heart. He’ll meditate on a self and then explode it to pieces.

This is a really fine piece of sculpture. I also think Bottle II, 2010 and Dancer II, 2010 are fine as well. At bare minimum, they pass the test that I laid out at the beginning of the piece. I absolutely think these three works generate enough interest, presence, and are dense enough with historical complexity to rival the sculptors that Houseago loves and loves to think about, even if the rest of works in the show do not (reserving the right, however, to be wrong about his new non-mask wall reliefs).

But even the three really good sculptures beg another, even more pressing question: if Houseago can hang formally with the greats, what is he bringing to the table that distinguishes him? He can pull off feats technically. He can be shifty like Picasso. He can come and go talking of Michelangelo, so what?

I actually think I have a premonition of where Houseago is headed. I mentioned Schütte earlier and I cannot help thinking of Schütte’s great work Ganz Grosse Geister (Big Spirits XL), 2004 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Like Houseago, Schütte can be reduced to easy tropes. A casual museum goer can say with confidence that Big Spirits channels the bulbous Michelin Man. A more than casual museum goer will detect the hint of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, 1889, perhaps because one of the figures asserts his chest forward (even though unlike the Rodin’s figure, his face is skyward rather than straight ahead) and another figure's hand juts outward. Calais, travel, the dynamics of historical sculptural groupings, popular culture, even a little techno light-stick dancing, all of these things come to mind when viewing the Schütte. Like Rattlesnake Figure, we can find the references and feel comfortable about them.

However, the references are not the whole story, not by a mile. This sculpture grows long in the mind—the figures are alien, not of this earth, somehow gleaming yellow and a Michelin Man yet not a cartoon. It is an odd, burrowing piece of sculptural intelligence that not only transcends its associations but gives you a sense that you are seeing something from around the corner or from across the universe. There’s a spirit and an energy that doesn’t merely come from enthusiasm (which Houseago has in spades) or from historical friction but from oddity, uniqueness, from a place that Schütte has access to but I do not.

It may sound slightly mysterious and it may be hard to explain, but if Houseago can ever show us a place like this of his own, we will really see something.

Alberto Burri in Art Review

2011-02-08T09:18:00.000-08:00

Alberto Burri
Santa Monica Museum of Art
Closed December 18th

In the December, 2010 issue of Art Review, I invite you to read my review of Alberto Burri at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. This is a link to the article online.

Thanks for Reading

Nathan Mabry

2011-02-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

Nathan Mabry
Cherry and Martin
Through February 12th

(Re-printed from Artslant.com)

After placing a solid, heavy Michael Heizer-ish hunk of rusty sculpture in the first gallery in the shape of a hand, Nathan Mabry has done an odd thing with the center gallery of Cherry and Martin. He has built a temple. In the foreground, he has placed a copy of Jacques Lipchitz’s Figure, 1926-30, set on a bed of gravel, crying with streaming water possibly to be used for ablutions. Deeper into the gallery stand three attendant goddesses around a central figure. The three sculptures are variations on Baga D’mba fertility shoulder masks atop bases painted entirely black but based on Donald Judd 1980s Swiss works. They surround the Deity of the space, an impressive sculpture The Week of Kindness, 2011, melding the famous Etruscan Romulus and Remus with Rauschenberg’s Odalisk, 1955/58 and Monogram 1955/59.

In Mabry’s temple, there are several simple registers. The contrast between the black totems and the white of the central Deity is striking―darkness, light, void, fullness, famine, fertility, chaos, order, these engrained, primal concepts wander into the room. However, their gravitas gets handled with a sense of humor. There is something funny about these objects, the Baga D’mba masks smirk cattily at you with their phallic facial features, they seem to strut atop the Judds like Rauschenberg taxidermied chickens. Mabry’s The Week of Kindness is equally absurd as Monogram . All the lofty theories about Monogram become utterly ridiculous in the face of what it is―a tire with a goat through it. Mabry’s take on Romulus and Remus is equally devious, sexual, and disarmingly funny.

The first time I wrote of Mabry’s work, I mentioned that they felt like jokes to me, that they were funny, that they played a loose hand with history. Since then, although I’ve gotten to know Mabry and his work better, the humor has remained the central issue for me.

Laughter can be a tricky thing. It can stem from Dada (destructive chaotic forces, nihilisitic, counter to order of any fashion, and detestable even when it’s aim is to bring down structures that are detestable) or from the absurd (an awareness of structures, seeing the full validity of multiple life paths and amused by that multiplicity’s inability to get along and by the strange frissons that arise). This second laughter grasps fullness instead merely enacting itself because it has nothing better to do in the emptiness. To me, this distinction is very important.

I’ve debated with myself about which side of this equation Mabry is on. For instance, when I see Lipchitz piece crying, I think of sculpture as laughing at people who genuinely believe in the embedded spirit in things, who believe that a water spot under a bridge in Chicago is the Virgin Mary or that a crucifix can bleed real blood. Mabry maybe suggesting that Lipchitz’s strenuous beliefs in modernist form and its ability to tap into the primitive power of other cultures was bound to have a short shelf life. Mabry’s piece laughs thus like an Onion article or a seconds long bit on the Simpsons about a cheese wedge that looks like Elvis. I don’t think that Mabry believes things are this simple, but history, belief, and sculptural symbols come across a hodgepodge of tectonic pieces that seems to talk past each other in this work. It comes across as a Dada form of laughter.

But then there is The Week of Kindness, such a zany mixture that it transcends any big ticket tectonics. The tire, Romulus and Remus, the white box in the middle, the baskets on top, it is unclear how these works interrelate though their interrelations are highly suggestive and fascinating. The origin myth of the Etruscan statue, mixed with the sexual connotation of the tire, and the fact that both elements create the base or the platform from which the piece grows and sustains itself, gives the piece a sense of fertility in and of itself. The baskets are both jokey and add to the mix, a basket being a place for Easter Eggs, for Spring Picnics, for some, a metaphor for female genitalia. There are no competing ideologies here instead elements taken from multiple cultures that add up to a strangely full, frisson of oddity that is genuinely funny. All the parts retain their meaning and that retention makes The Week of Kindness an extraordinary object.

A few months back, Cherry and Martin had a group show of artists from their gallery and the show included a couple of Mabry pieces that I had never seen before that, along with The Week of Kindness, may be a premonition of things to come. The two works featured the same base/top dichotomy that we’ve come to expect from Mabry, but this time the base, welded metal tubing melded into a lyrical hand-sculpted work that recalled for me, the souvenir soap stone sculptures of gazelles or embraced lovers that I brought home from Africa. The rough hewn but simple rigor of the base and the handled quality of the top piece made the work so dynamic and strange that neither the base nor the top could be quantified as anything specific. I was fascinated by the work, it continued to open up and provide new avenues to explore. It was also funny.

Mabry is an important sculptor, and I think he’s capable of both the Dada gesture as well as the more edifying, less easy to parse out and to simplify, presentation of the absurd. I, for one, like the later works better, and this seems to be the direction that Mabry’s heading. I am looking forward to more.

Kaz Oshiro and Steve Wolfe

2010-12-25T18:25:00.000-08:00

Kaz Oshiro in Home Anthology 2
Las Cienegas Projects
Closed December 11, 2010

Steve Wolfe on Paper
LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Through February 20, 2011

(Reprinted from Artslant.com)

It is, initially, hard for me to justify why anyone would ever worry about trompe-l'œil anymore. At their best, trompe-l'œil artists might just be labeled masters of special effects, sort of industrial beings focused on making an impressive product without meditating on why you should make such products in the first place (falling short in the equation that “impressive object + meaning > impressive object”).

Furthermore, the objects or images that are mimicked, in how they are fawned over by the artist and in how they are objects that are usually memorials from the artist’s life, are nostalgic not in a history reviving way but in a limiting way, having validity for the artist alone, as a lover might hold the photograph of his lost beloved, the photograph having no similar meaning in anyone else’s hands.

Then of course, there is the basic and ever-present objection, usually leveled at 2-D trompe-l'œil artists, that their effects can be handled by machines. Photo theory especially likes this, the argument that in the world of 2-D replication of reality, a painting has little reality whereas a photograph actually uses the light of reality to imprint an image that retains a bit of actual, real objective existence.

These thoughts come my way because there is a fair amount of really fine trompe-l'œil art on view in Los Angeles at the moment in the work of Kaz Oshiro at Las Cienegas Projects and Steve Wolfe at LACMA. Furthermore, on a recent trip to Miami, I encountered even more of Oshiro’s work at Emmanuel Perrotin, a sparse collection of objects that have become Oshiro’s trademark. Both artists are extremely skilled in their craft, their effects are peerless, and as could be predicted from the paragraph above, the word on the street about these two artists ranges from people being impressed to those who are downright apathetic. Some dismiss them, others champion them. I admit my own reactions have included this entire range of opinions. There is something about trompe-l'œil, however, that strikes to the core of art, its illusions both interesting and slightly disappointing. On one hand, it’s innocuous, on another hand, dangerous enough for Socrates to kick painters out of the Republic for their crimes.

But first, a little description. Oshiro’s show at Las Cienegas Projects includes two pieces. Large in the space, one work is a yellow dumpster which no doubt ranks among the many technical trompe-l'œil feats that Oshiro has achieved over the years. Full sized, the object (or painting for it‘s made of stretcher bars, canvas, paint, and bondo) is perfect, recording every stain, every gash, every ding. The second object in the room is an oblong entity, hanging, perhaps best described as a rectangular box which juts out slightly from the wall on one end. The object resembles nothing and though has trompe-l'œil features, isn’t mimicry in the traditional sense — it may recall a ceiling duct, but representationally speaking, you cannot say with confidence that is anything particular other than a sculpture or a painting. This small show in Los Angeles occurs at the same time as a much larger exhibition at Perrotin, the last show for the Paris gallery’s outpost in Miami, featuring more of the oblong boxes alongside more Oshiro icons like his dust paintings, his trash bins, and his modular speaker arrangements.

Oshiro’s objects mimic reality, but the reality they mimic is the reality of painting. Painting’s reality is that of surface and armature (a support), a 2-dimensional image that becomes a three dimensional object. It is still just an image having no practical purpose (Oshiro's speakers don’t make sound, the trash can cannot receive rubbish) or existence as true things. Oshiro’s objects are not objects in and of themselves like a ready-made. Instead, the image is everything. Donald Judd described this way of thinking as a way to, quoted in James Meyers’ Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, “project(ed) a rational order onto the perceived world.” Oshiro’s objects are representations that push closer and closer to becoming things, but like paintings never make it. Oshiro exists in a clear legacy. From Zeuxis’s grapes, to Baroque ceilings, to American painters like John Fredrick Peto and William Harnett, to Oshiro’s teacher Daniel Douke, the game is mimicry but the stakes are philosophical. They are half-way houses of reality.

Steve Wolfe focuses on books, and his aims might be considered more personal than philosophical. His 2-D drawings and sculptures feature the cheap, well handled paperbacks that are stuff of serious readers. These books, with their dog ears and tears and bloated contents, have been read over and over — the attention that is paid by Wolfe to his trompe-l'œil detailing matches the detail that the apparent readers have paid to each book. Like Oshiro, the touches, the evidence of their handling, are present.

For Wolfe, the supposition is that these are personal copies, and by going over personal copies with a fine tooth comb and with loving attention, the objects are resurrected, edified, and the simple joys of living are revealed as enough because they are capable of holding our attention. “Our personal copy of Voltaire or Stein,” according to Carter Foster’s account of Wolfe in the LACMA Catalogue, “represents our own intersection with the greatness of culture.”

So the hand and attention of trompe-l'œil is what redeems, and I have decided that it is enough for me. This simple assertion of the value of art at the basic level is not only visually interesting but has the opportunity to test and bring to crisis some our most treasured possessions, our memories, our loves, our passions. John Yau, for example in his catalogue essay on Daniel Douke, would say that the care and attention paid to an object through trompe-l'œil and our ability to appreciate the effort is a humanistic pursuit, something that animates an object out of the industrial, mass produced realm and back into the realm of human action, where the attention one pays to the object in and of itself adds meaning to the situation.

Thus, the old argument that the indexicality of photography gives us a piece of the event, that it draws us physically closer to the recorded event, because literally the same light is still somehow present, is too easy for the trompe-l'œil artist. In the case of Wolfe, Oshiro, Peto and Harnett, they had no trouble working after photography. It isn’t the representation that matters but what the object and representation mean to the individual. If you believe that the human interaction with things means something, the trompe-l'œil of Oshiro and Wolfe should work for you as well.

Film Review: Waste Land by Lucy Walker

2010-11-09T11:07:00.000-08:00

Waste Land, by Lucy Walker
Playing November and December at Select Theaters

(Reprinted from For Your Art)

The catadores, or trash pickers, of the Jardim Gramacho dump outside of Rio de Janeiro can deduce a person’s class by their garbage. Small bits, in re-used grocery bags, indicate someone hovering near poverty line. Playboy magazines, shoes that could have sustained much more wear, old technology — all these lead the catadores to conclude the dumper was middle or upper-class. The pickers can be analytic, even philosophical, in their jobs. They know which piles have valuable potential; some also reflect on the meaning of their labor.

Waste Land, a new documentary film by Lucy Walker, follows artist Vik Muniz as he makes photographic portraits of Jardim Gramacho’s catadores. Muniz’s builds images out of all sorts of materials -- dust, ash, to chocolate -- and then subsequently photographs the material; it is, in some respects, a reuse and reinvention, an ideal artistic metaphor for the life of the catadores. The optimism of Muniz’s work suits his subjects here as well: the catadores, at their most optimistic, can transform their existence in trash into one of dignity.

Waste Land, which is playing in November and December in theaters across the United States, is a series of vignettes about the pickers who become the subjects of Muniz’s photographs. We meet Tiaõ, the leader of the Association for the Pickers of Jardim Gramacho (ACAMJG), who becomes one of the protagonists of the film. We meet Isis, Irma, Suelem, and Magna. We meet an elderly gentleman, Valter, who is compelling not only for his pithy philosophy, but for his comfort with his status as a picker and his fundamental belief in the value of his life. Then there is Zumbi, who dreams of building a library of discarded books.

As each player tells his or her story, Muniz becomes absorbed. He is inspired by their cooperation, horrified by the conditions, and is taken up by their tragedies. He is also captured by a poetic idea: using the garbage collected by the pickers, and arranged by them, to create their own portraits, one of which will be subsequently sold at auction in support of ACMAJG.

Yet what starts as a feel good film (partially motivated by big ticket concerns over over-population, the need for sustainability, and the horrors of poverty, not to
mention, self-satisfied with its bullish belief of redemption through
art) becomes a complicated moral knot. Muniz begins to recognize the potential for extreme harm in his actions, the moral ambiguity of his pursuits, and the vulnerability of his subjects. In a sharp moment, Muniz is interrogated, “What are you going to do, bring them to London?” In other words, what can Muniz do for the catadores now that he has shown them art and offered them a more comfortable job for a brief period of time? Can they return, with any sort of contentment, to the landfill?

The artist, from a working class family, came into some money after a bizarre turn of events in which he got shot in the leg. Afterward, Muniz left Brazil for the United States and worked a variety of odd jobs before achieving a successful career in the arts. Once the beneficiary of strange fortune, Muniz would now appear to be the bearer of good fortune at the landfill, but it’s not a role he can fully live up to. Unforeseen were the complications and troubles of his involvement with the catadores. Muniz has the power to improve the catadores’ life for a short time, but ultimately is powerless to truly transform their lives.

Hiring the catadores to be part of his photography practice—taking them temporarily away from the landfill—is akin to giving a person candy for the first time. On one hand, the experience throws into sharp relief the previous candy-less existence, which can lead to despair. On the other hand, the taste of this sweeter reality can lead to a transformation, the creation of a desire to make such a reality permanent. The worst outcome, however—and this hovers in the background in this film—is that candy isn’t good for the person. The introduction of this troubling element in their lives, in fact, may harm a person who had been quite content.

Waste Land faces these dilemmas as Muniz does, and the outcome is worth observing. This is a rich documentary, exquisitely structured and emotionally penetrating. The character to watch, however, is Muniz. The moral ambiguities he faces as he realizes his ambitious work face anyone trying to effect a change inside of a large problem. The outcome is not always uplifting. This film has the admirable courage to show this tough side of giving back.

Blinky Palermo

2010-11-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Through January 16th, 2011

(Reprinted from Artslant.com)

Blinky Palermo was born Peter Schwarze in 1943, subsequently adopted he became Peter Heisterkamp. And, as far as I know, there are at least two origin stories for why, around 1964, his name changed again to Blinky Palermo.

First, some say his teacher Joseph Beuys gave him the moniker because of Heisterkamp’s resemblance to the famous gangster and boxing promoter (Beuys loved boxing), and this makes a certain amount of sense: origin myths and the magic of names (his name especially) were central to the elder artist’s practice.

Beuys was the master of the Kunstacademie Düsseldorf, the most famous living German artist, and, not the least, a diva. I can imagine Beuys, from his figurative height atop the apex of German art, bestowing the nom de guerre “Blinky Palermo” onto Heisterkamp, along with it the secrets of the artist as, in Beuys' words, both “shaman and showman.” It was as if Beuys was trying to bring his student Heisterkamp into a type of artmaking where your name and art practice become ever more massive, appropriating the myths and history of the German past, concocting new myths, and asking for everything. What was expected was nothing less than a complete transformation, starting with the personal and concluding in political revolution.

Think of Anselm Kiefer (two years younger than Palermo), and how more than anything else, his self-portrait and personality are the origin and center-point of his oeuvre. Beuys and Kiefer are part of a German cult of personality rooted in the stridently romantic Teutonic past, where a lyric poet or an opera composer could unlock the secrets of the universe and heal the world.

Viewing Palermo’s work at LACMA, however, the other story of how Heisterkamp became Palermo becomes more probable. This story holds that he came up with name in his studio, alongside his friend and studio mate, Klaus Wolf Knoebel. Klaus Wolf had already changed his first name to “Imi,” after a shortened form of goodbye he shared with his friends prior to studying in Düsseldorf. Both epithets in this version are more friendly nicknames and less career posturing stage names.

The two young artists were influenced heavily by Beuys, but in important ways were removed from him and had different values. Knoebel, for a case in point, later occupied the classroom next to Beuys, and Knoebel’s room 19 (his first major work being even called Raum 19, 1968) becoming an intellectual counterpoint to the activities of Beuys’ room 20. Knoebel and Palermo had other interests in mind than mythology that would grow their names into out-sized egos that Deutschland could rally behind.

Though this may have shifted later on for Knoebel, they wanted something more humble, more ethereal, more fun, an art that neither needed to become a political party nor needed to unify the universe. In fact, looking at LACMA’s important presentation of Palermo (along with several works by Knoebel and Gunther Forg for comparison), it is wonderful to take in just how basic Palermo is and how un-ambitious his project is as an artist.

While Beuys would make a metaphysical postulations about primal conditions of heat and conservation, Palermo just seems to ask questions like, “Can I get something from the Utopian forms of Malevich without buying into his mysticism?” or “Can I just have the dynamism of basic shapes playing intuitively on a canvas, sensing a purpose in the play yet not needing a reason?” Palermo’s funky result is Composition with 8 Red Rectangles, 1964.

When Kiefer is walking Germany, taking pictures of himself in the compromised poses of the Third Reich, wanting to boldly address the very raw and recent past, Palermo asks if there a tonal, jazzy way to make a connection between two roughly drawn triangles as in Devoted to Thelonious Monk, 1969. Palermo wants the essential intuitive energy of basics and fusses over the details in order to achieve it.

I don’t use the phrase un-ambitious in a derogatory way, instead Palermo’s inquisitive, almost philosophical lack of ambition, his ability to take art to its rudimentary starting points and discover invention in those humble beginnings is exactly what makes him charming. There are no wails and grinding of teeth, no existential dilemmas. Actually, what is strangely present is a bit of comedy, mostly as the expense of American modernists.

Palermo, for instance, admitted an interest in moody Americans such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, eventually moving to New York in 1973 and living there for two and a half years, longing for a formal modernism whose sun had set. However, the spirit with which he approached figures like Newman and Rothko is with a playful spirit, as in works such as Time of Day I, 1974-75.

Both Newman and Rothko would have probably balked at the achievement of Palermo in the largest room of the LACMA exhibition, where he used purchased fabric to mimic painting, offering expanses of color and wispy transitions of hues. They smack of a Duchampian joke on Newman and Rothko yet they have the visual impact, they have the punch. That they are cloth and not paint is no matter to Palermo. “I believe in you guys,” he seems to be saying, “just allow me to find your beauty in things other than paint.”

LACMA is full of these charming moments (charm being a word easy to use with Palermo), tracking his early explorations into his larger cloth works (the highlight of the show), into his later paintings on aluminum (which American audiences know from Dia). Palermo is delightfully relevant to, but different from, both his German peers as well as the American artists he admired.

Maybe Heisterkamp liked “Blinky Palermo” because it’s a jazzy name just like often his paintings and arrangements can be jazzy. Ultimately, Palermo strikes me as wide eyed and into America in the way that Piet Mondrian was in Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43, interested in relaxing formal concerns in order to pick up the pulse of things, the feeling of surroundings.

This explanation seems just as likely as anything else.

Paul McCarthy

2010-10-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

Paul McCarthy: Three Sculptures

L&M Arts, Los Angeles

Through November 6, 2010

(Reprinted from Artslant.com)

I wonder if there could be a book length treatment of the pathetic. Books on the abject, sincerity, authenticity, the uncanny, and other elusive descriptors exist, but nothing I can find on the pathetic. You would think it would be fodder for a class warrior Marxist critic who could point to moments of sympathy, pity, and sadness that arise in person of privileged position due to the actions of someone in a low state or lower class, someone overly earnest, overly awkward, someone striving when they have no chance at nobility or proper recognition outside of their own fantasies. We on the outside, with knowledge of the societal frameworks that are producing the striving person’s embarrassing display, stand over the person and simply judge, “You’re pathetic.”

My first encounter in art with the pathetic was in Crime and Punishment, when I became overwhelmed with sadness and pity for Katerina Ivanovna, wife of the alcoholic Marmeladov, when she, once proud of her aristocratic heritage, parades her children through the street, singing wildly, and begging for money. The performance is dignified for Katerina but it is the reader who knows how far she has fallen in life. Another encounter with pathetic came when aristocrats shovel high quality oysters down the throat of a young boy in Chekhov’s masterwork story Oysters. Feeding the starved child is perverse sport for the rich and, of course, the boy’s subsequent sickness becomes not only his but the reader's as well. Such is the force of our pity and the sting of Chekhov’s indictment of our privilege.

I bring up the pathetic because it used to be the first word that came to my mind when I encountered Paul McCarthy’s work, work that I’ve hated for so long and taken such pains to avoid out of mere distaste for its lack of civility and charm, that now, of course, it is unavoidable and important. Then too, with the opening of L&M's magisterial space in Venice, which features three McCarthy sculptures, Ship of Fools, Ship Adrift, 2010, Apple Tree Boy, Apple Tree Girl, 2010, and Train Mechanical, 2003-2010, there came another occasion to think about McCarthy.

I remember my first encounter with McCarthy’s work, his Painter, 1995. A man struggles to paint with large fingers and he is doing it badly. McCarthy staged the expression “Ham Fisted” and the flailing of the earnest painter was documented, down to him hitting his overworked and bloated hands with a butcher knife. Some critics consider this a parody on the idea of the “heroic painter,” the modernist dream of unlocking secrets in private, its hero closed off from the world yet saving the world. And to that end, in that way of thinking, I guess you could consider McCarthy’s proceedings in Painter funny. The flailing of the painter, pushed into awkward madness in his clumsy beliefs, reveals the gross, chaotic impulses which regulate him, impulses that have the benefit of being “true” if no other benefit, being the basis of all selfish human action.

However, I tend to see the validity of art and even the validity of painting in Painter (mostly because I believe in art and painting and the virtue of those that transact its business, and because of this belief, I am unable to see the parody). Therefore I feel a certain amount of weird sympathy for the painter, an amount of pity. His failure, his lack of talent, is pathetic. This feeling in me is productive in that I examine my relationship to the painter and put my beliefs on the line. My structures, if I have them, are tested, but ultimately affirmed. McCarthy stretches them but they don’t break.

Now I doubt McCarthy would agree with me, and the critics above would be quick to point out that it is my categories (my sense of elitist belief that I know what good painting “is”) that animates this quite false sense of sympathy and pity. They would also point out that McCarthy’s point in testing those categories of my false reading, and those feelings, is to show how underneath it all, they are arbitrary. The same would be true if I feel this sympathy and pity at McCarthy’s disgusting dinner parties, where he ends up drinking fluids out of his anus with a tube, sticking hotdogs in all sorts of inventive places, and rolling around in ketchup. The “correct” reading would be that McCarthy shows a certain American lifestyle and happiness to be barely capable of concealing its primitive impulses and that when the bubble bursts, it reveals the chaos. It “shatters boundaries” and that is what the wall labels and curatorial statements end up saying. The only thing missing is a reason to care.

Nobody is denying that civilization is achieved and not preset. We all know that the struggle for order has been a work in progress and that the order is not only a fragile state but something that could unravel at any moment. However, I think these critics are wrong to think that the power of McCarthy’s art lies in his ability to break boundaries. Instead, those feelings of repulsion mixed with sympathy and pity for his characters, that acute sense of the pathetic that is rooted in those same categories, those constructs that put one lifestyle over another and show both failure and success as being an actual noble enterprise on a sliding scale of progress, is the only reason why I can think about and get into McCarthy’s work (when forced to do so – because, with all due respect for the august artist, it’s gross). This thought is the only thing that is productive to me. Simply revealing the absurdity of existence, unraveling things so we can see that nothing really matters, to parody pursuits that people believe in, is an abhorrent lack of ambition in the face of the power of the pathetic and the power of living in the real world, where people care about things and can live, quite sincerely, in their constructs. It is simply a fart joke. It is McCarthy on the cover of ArtReview mooning the world. It’s ridiculous.

All this said, I get to the L&M show.

McCarthy at L&M, perhaps most shockingly, appears pretty tame, and two of the works, Ship and Apple, come across as almost collegial, despite their lumpen masses of rips and tears. Train Mechanical, though graphic with its portraits of W giving it to a group of pigs, comes across, at least to me, as far less disturbing than your average, sincere Disney animatron. But to say that these sculptures are tame, though a criticism, is not a proper criticism of McCarthy. “Tame” and “shocking” are neither powerful qualifiers of a work of art nor are they in anyway descriptive.

I would ask the question: Do these expensively produced objects have, even remotely,the power of one of McCarthy's sad, knifed, soiled dolls that probably cost him a couple of bucks to make? One of the masterful innovations of the work of McCarthy and Mike Kelley is that they retooled the readymade (an ordinary object placed in an art context) to be an object that carries a traumatic history. Duchamp’s cold, inhuman ordinary objects were replaced with teddies and dolls that were cared for, subsequently soiled, and therefore are stained with human interaction. These lend the objects an animistic power, and also a pathetic quality that compels sympathy, memory, and a sense of loss. McCarthy’s dolls hold this power. His big sculptures at L&M do not.

The cute German cherub faces of Ship and Apple, riven through with spikes and clotted with ashen material, are just sculptures. They have a certain amount of visual punch that takes your eyes around them, but as objects that elicit a response, they are dead on arrival. Train Mechanical, on the other hand, begs to be noticed; it takes an extravagant amount of human effort to make its point, and this definitely compels a response. Not the response, however, that you would think.

Train Mechanical is a juvenile statement on Bush and his legacy, an overly simplified metaphor for the position that we are apparently in economically and globally. The sculpture points to the reason why—Bush’s overactive swaggering loins pushing the machinery of corporate America, manipulating and shredding the people like pigs. The piece does not implicate the viewer, involving them in a series of responses that may compel self-reflection on their part in this matter, but instead offers them a whipping boy, a collective out for these times of troubles. I am just as angry with Bush as the next guy, but McCarthy’s sculpture has the depth of Hustler cartoon.

It is easy to make jokes that the left (most of the artworld) will lap up, but the sense of viewer positioning, that true ability of McCarthy to get a person involved if in no other way than getting them to leave the room (my reaction), is missing. There is nothing pathetic or noble or otherwise. That’s a tragic loss.

Book Review: Andy Warhol by Arthur Danto

2010-10-18T16:12:00.001-07:00

Andy Warhol, Arthur Danto

Paperback published September 28, 2010

Yale Press

Arthur Danto loves Andy Warhol, and his love for Warhol drips from the pages of a multitude of essays and books (and there are many) that he has written over the course of his long and brilliant career. Danto is a straightforward and clear writer who often can convey extremely complex information in a way that makes you feel as though he has pulled you aside in a bar, just to tell you a fascinating story about a guy he once knew. This is rare in a critic, even rarer in a philosopher. It’s disappointing that Danto is primarily known for his “End of Art” theorizing because I’ve found his reviews, his book on Robert Mapplethorpe, and his collected works in general to be ripe with insight as well.

Unfortunately, you won’t find much new in his short Yale Press book simply titled Andy Warhol, but Danto has written a book with an elegiac tone that lends his subject a bit of personal reverence that we’ve long suspected Danto felt for Warhol. In order to achieve this, thankfully, Warhol becomes more human. Danto reveres but doesn’t worship. We find that Warhol was a genius but often needed help, that perhaps some of the most unglamorous facts of his life might have meant the most to his art (for instance, his unattractive appearance), that his philosophical import has almost a spiritual bearing on how we see yet he was probably unaware of his philosophy, and ultimately that his objects basically made certain questions in art religious ones though he is not a religious artist.

Andy Warhol is not an art book, per se. Edited by Mark Crispin Miller, the book is included in Yale’s Icon’s of America Series, a group of book pitched outside of the academy and art world. Warhol, in Yale’s eyes, ranks among Thomas Jefferson, Fred Astaire, Wall Street and the Empire State Building in term of his American Iconicity. The theme of the series is the theme of the book, as Danto’s maintains that Warhol is the ultimate mirror of American life, “What was so American about it (Warhol’s practice)? Andy painted S&H green stamps. He painted American currency in small denominations. He painted what Americans eat. People felt that he was one of them, even when he talked about business art being the best art.”

Danto is correct and just looking over the titles of the Icon’s series one can swiftly see Warhol's genuine love for the American ordinary -- think of his Dance Diagrams for Astaire, his printed money and art as corporation idea for Wall Street, and Empire for the Empire State Building, it is all there. If it was American and wasn’t yet art, Warhol made sure it became art straight away. But the American ordinary is only part of a larger point, that this “transfiguration of the ordinary” gave contemporary art a philosophical position that has never existed before – if two things look the same and one is art, why is one art and not the other?

Hence, religion. It is art often because we believe it to be so and accord it that power from our mechanisms and structures, our histories, our loves. We make it so and nothing guarantees it. This thought is both freeing and horrible.

This insight of Warhol and Danto is extraordinary, and not even remotely examined to the full extent of its potential in art history and contemporary criticism. On one hand, the insight can easily lend itself to cynicism. For instance, if one thing is art and the other isn’t, and it is simply belief that makes it so, then I can choose not to believe, do as I wish, and rely on the silly patrons of illusionary meaning to support any idiocy I put forth (many of the wanton, unanchored proceedings of many young artists fit in this camp). On the other hand, the insight can basically animate everything and give us a power that we perhaps never wished to have, that of having to arbitrate our own meaning and kept a firm grip on it at all times, not choosing the cynical road because that road only leads to despair. This is the sacred road, the road of Frank O’Hara’s lunchtime sandwich and John Cage’s pregnant silence, this is the sacred mystery of the ordinary.

Danto, with an earnestness that will almost make you blush, lovingly finds Warhol in the second, non-cynical camp. Danto loves thinking about (it is almost cheesy to say it) Warhol’s love of the democratic openness of soup and how it was the same for everybody and sustained everyone. To keep it Catholic, which Warhol was, he was “thankful for his daily bread.” Danto describes Warhol love for collaboration, the energy that he got from those in his circle “the crazies,” and his close attunement to the surface makeup of things as that which animated his discoveries. My favorite moment is Warhol’s quest for the unified aura of stockroom, that making Brillo boxes was not enough, that he wanted the whole feeling of the store, its embedded and glowing totality.

Perhaps Danto loves Warhol too much. For instance, I’ve often suspected that Warhol’s elusiveness, his cageyness, his famous wispy personality might have contained a trace of despair due to his knowledge of his artistic reality, that he fully created the artistic reality and nothing guaranteed it. I think it is oversimplified to think of Warhol as a fetishist and a lover without thinking about his cold gamesmanship. The Court Jester’s knowledge of the absurdity of life is never without a price. But ultimately, I am glad Danto didn’t go there. Many have and we can take this in a later day. At the moment, in this book, it is great to witness someone merely loving something as Danto loves Warhol.

Ryan Trecartin

2010-10-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever

MOCA Pacific Design Center

Through October 17, 2010

(Reprinted from ArtSlant.com)

One of my favorite quotes, written early in the 20th century, long before the internet or wikipedia or social networking or Twitter or Youtube is this from T.S Eliot: “The vast accumulation of knowledge – or at least of information --- deposited by the 19th century have been responsible for an equally advanced ignorance.”

I always found these words particularly bitter because of what they must suggest about our present, where information has become not only instant by hyperdimensional model, but also so fluid and mobile that it can be stretched, manipulated, spun, twisted, and changed entirely, information that is basically non-informative and just data to be used, data to be placed completely at the service of desire and if you are Marxist (which I’m not) by Capitalism. The present is a world of instant gratification par excellence when it comes to information, and it is hard not to recognize a bit of Eliot’s double sided coin when it comes to the promulgation of information. I know that ignorance, the infantile, and the pathetic must have always existed, but it is hard not to see it everywhere now.

Ryan Trecartin offers this same, reality-television loving, vulgar society, but to such a stretched hyper degree, that you feel even more overwhelmed than usual. His seven part video exhibition Any Ever dynamically changes MOCA Pacific Design center spatially and in terms of video, takes the idea of the quick cutting and assemblage of brief, manic episodes to such a pulsing, raging state that his video temporarily suspends and disrupts your reason and leaves you a befuddled hive of half sensations. So many characters come and go, so many ideas offered quickly and never spoken of again, so many angles, it almost falls into a complete mess. You get the sense, however, that it isn’t a mess, and this may be the most disturbing thought of all. The worst of it is that the proceedings seem more familiar than strange.

I will try to set the scene, though it is difficult. MOCA PDC has been transformed into a series of 5 viewing rooms, each presenting a different video work. Each has a different seating arrangement, two have chairs, another a set of audience platforms and airplane seats, a third a series of beds, and the last, a group of couches. Once seated, you lock yourself into the sound of each video with a pair of headphones. In fact, just on the surface, the space feels like a bad Whitney Biennial full of artists that think that the fact that a viewer sits in a bean bag and views children doing childish things is a work of art. Trecartin, in a sense, is presenting the same, but beyond, way beyond. He presents children and adults acting like children—over saturated, and over the top children that seem to be spiraling into madness.

I admit, after watching the videos for some time, I don’t have even a remote handle on it all, but I get the sense that the characters are driven ultimately by the need for total exposure, they want nearly transcendent presence in the hypermedia world. Whether they are Trecartin’s businessmen, which he strangely calls the Koreas, or his army of tween girls, they literally beg for more saturation, a total union with wizzing information that tears any idea of a consistent, steady self and personality into thousands of exploding pieces. One young girl, pigtailed and dabbed with enough makeup to make her look like a cherry tomato, sums it up and I’ll paraphrase, “I’m waiting for the internet to declare its independence.” The suggestion is that the girl will happily move there, completely extinguishing the physical, boring reality of a self that lives in one place, that interacts with real people, for a hyper-self that doesn’t see traditional reality as any fun at all.

One thought I had in the installation was of reality television’s ability to take hours and hours of exceedingly boring footage from people’s lives and compress it into a one hour series of climaxes, dramatic upswings, fights, arguments, basically people at their craziest. In other words, actual reality does not make good television and does not sell products. In Trecartin’s world, the compression is even more extreme, each second is a sound bite of ignorant ranting, pleading for products and stardom, complaints about any sort of deglamorized existence.

I admit life, at its most vexing, resembles Trecartin’s extremes, and one thing I find dazzling about Ryan Trecartin’s ambitious, actually quite massive, installation is that even though I felt bludgeoned in the face with most of the awful, loathsome, low, pathetic, horrible, terrible moments of present day society, I somehow came out of it reflective. There is nothing quite like Trecartin’s video work, and I am not saying this is a good thing in and of itself. It’s not. New for new’s sake is not a virtue. Actually, the verdict is still out about whether or not I want to ever encounter a work by Trecartin again. I’m not sure it is good for me.

Eliot’s quote haunts this installation. Is Trecartin’s universe a warning or a wish? Does Trecartin bring forth such a manic world so we can see that it is where we are clearly headed, and thus, realize we should make the most of it? Is the hyper-self a good thing? Is this jumping pulsar of self-hood a new low of ignorance or a new height of achievement? I don’t know where Trecartin stands on these matters. I think the hyper-self is a terrible thing, a shill being that is devoid of almost everything I love in life, but I am intrigued to learn more about Trecartin’s stance. It may compel me to go back to the madness in some sort of Quixotic attempt to understand the madness, or it may simply lead to spending time cultivating virtues that counteract Trecartin’s world. Who knows which way desire will spin.

Yvonne Venegas in Art Review

2010-10-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

Yvonne Venegas: Maria Elvia De Hank Series

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica

Closed August 28, 2010

In the October, 2010 issue of Art Review, I invite you to read my review of Yvonne Venegas: Maria Elvia De Hank Series at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. This is a link to the article online

Thanks for Reading

Rachel Harrison

2010-07-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

Rachel Harrison

Regen Projects II

Show closed July 10, 2010

(Reposted from ArtSlant.com)

Rachel Harrison is phoning it in as of late.

For an artist that for many (not me) represented a wonky, handmade burst of fresh air in the mid-90s, her proceedings, it is easy to argue, now have a certain rote feel to them. She’s been, for instance, trotting out her photographs from an ongoing series of photographs called Voyage of the Beagle and placing them next to a sparse population of sculptures since 2007. That’s only 3 years, and perhaps unfair to say, but it stands to reason that an artist, so often praised for funny singular moments of sculpture, would have more dynamism when it comes to a gallery space. She’s capable of such dynamism, but at the moment is either too busy (probable), taking on too many shows because of market need (definitely) or just lazy (hard to know).

Before I go on to discuss affirmatively many of the individual sculptures in Harrison’s current exhibition, ASDFJKL; at Regen Projects, I need to clear the air on the Voyage of the Beagle photographs and say exactly why the entire series for me is entirely inadequate. In the series, Harrison photographs and presents various sculptural moments from around the world, most of the time straight ahead views of busts, mannequins, taxidermy animals, ancient statues and votives, and even toilet seats. They are remarkable in their diversity and in the oddity of the juxtapositions, but there are a couple of problems here.

First, photographic work of this nature and exactly for Harrison’s purpose, has existed for artists ever since the camera was able to be employed as a quick recorder of visual experience. In historical shows, we take delight in the photographic contexts for artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, and even older artists like Fernand Knopff, taking in how their photographs seem to be found instances where moments in their art become apparent photographically perhaps because the photos were an inspiration. These working studio documents point, as an archive, to ongoing aesthetic inquires that may elude the casual observer of their major work. They are helpful and illuminating. Every artist I know has a body of photographs like this, and it is baffling that Harrison gets credit for hers as, in the words of Alison Gingeras (from an essay on Harrison in Parkett No. 82), “readymade versions of her own work” or work that “sets off for uncharted formal and conceptual territories.” The photos should stay in her studio where they belong and where they can inform her often quite witty sculptural work.

Second, that these photographs, as interesting and fun as some of them may be are taken seriously as works of art leads me to again be concerned over the influence of the sloppy thinking behind so much archive work. It is not bad for meaning to remain pliable and be negotiated into shape by a viewer, but the fact remains that such an investment in a gallery space is a far fetched proposition. Worse, it’s an invitation for an artist to simply not to take the time to think through the concerns they are interested in when it comes to their archives. I had this problem with Sam Durant’s use of display material from a closed American Heritage museum a few years back at Blum and Poe. In that show, we were given clumsy sculptures and a pile of books to read, and such is the case with Harrison’s Voyage of the Beagle. The archive in front of you is just an unformed mass of material from which an artist should do something.

Fortunately if the Voyage of the Beagle was left in Harrison’s studio, one can still have a good time with many of her works in this show. Certainly, the exhibition has its moments. The basic logic of the works uses gnarly or grizzled masses of lumpen material to create plinths, elaborate bases, or environments for little collaged moments on the surface of the sculpture where other real world objects come into play. Say what you will about many of the infantile moments in Harrison’s work, she knows how to nest a collaged object in a sculptural surrounding quite well, embedding something as random as a Chinese food take out menu into a new material situation and have it make a certain amount of zany sense.

There is a narrative order to many of Harrison’s works and often the pay-off is like a well-placed punch-line at the end of a joke. My favorite moment was a particular white, gooey plinth called Around the Water Cooler, 2010 that initially reminded me, in a bad way, of something Urs Fisher or Terrance Koh might do. However walking around the piece reveals an actual water cooler positioned in a groove in the side of the piece. The sculpture ceases instantly to be an art object and becomes an actual water cooler. It is not that the transition is interesting (it happens all the time), it is that it is deadpan and funny. I cannot buy David Pagel’s review of the work in the Los Angeles Times that finds Harrison employed in a removed, academic enterprise. The work is often too humorous for that.

Pagel is right, however, that Harrison does have many erudite and annoying academic writers pushing her work, layering it with piles of overworked rubbish that is unfortunate (see Gingeras above though admittedly, she is curator and not an academic), and he is also right that Harrison may believe her morbidly overwrought Freudian PR. But in many ways, it should be noted, the overly familiar feeling of her current show at Regen is a product of her own influence on a younger generation of artists.

So many sculptures feel like Rachel Harrisons (if I see another leaning wall piece, I might just hang up my hat and move on) and perhaps this familiarity leads writers like George Baker (also writing in Parkett) to place Harrison as a part of a generalized sculptural moment where thoughts on formal relationships relies on what Baker calls “promiscuous relation” or “polymorphous perversity”—“a sculpture holding up other objects, other forms, a sculpture of attachment, of juxtaposition, of connection.” You might place artists (repressing for just a moment their individual projects and just going formal) like Thomas Hirshhorn, Urs Fisher, Sterling Ruby, Amanda Ross-Hoss, Nate Lowman, Manfred Pernice and countless others in this category, in the sculpture as “subjective construction” moment where, since the self is split, fractured, and riven with so many contradictions, the subjective constructions look like that as well—accumulations of objects, messy apartments, and connections that are wild and hodgepodge.

It may be the case that this is what we are at the moment and this is our sculpture, but for me the verdict is still out. I haven’t given up on elegance and reason just yet.

Aaron Curry

2010-07-22T16:58:00.000-07:00

Aaron Curry: Two Sheets Thick

David Kordansky Gallery

Closes August 7, 2010

(Reposted from ArtSlant.com)

Aaron Curry’s new exhibition at David Kordansky finds the artist looking for a type of ambitious formal and conceptual scale that has always eluded him, mostly one assumes for lack of studio and exhibition space. The gallery is pleasantly full of large, freestanding sculptures in bright colors and the walls are completely papered over with grey toned screen prints of liquid bubbles (Tonky Star (Points of Cosmogenesis), 2010). A bubble might be a metaphor for what Curry wants—a shiny, fluid situational space where forms in surface tension break and reconfigure. He may also want to tap into that wanton and fun impulse in all of us to burst bubbles, to spend way too much time with packing material, annoying everyone around with the popping of idle fingers. Perhaps, Curry just wants the pop, a self-proclaimed “television and arcade kind of kid” that can give YouTube clips as answers to questions in interviews. It is difficult to know.

One thing I do know, however, is that Curry did not completely succeed, and his Kordansky show is a curious enterprise. I felt two very familiar things tensions in the space, and the labor and joy involved with interacting with the work seems to spring from these oppositions—namely modernist sculpture that we know quite well from sculptors like Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi, and the fact that the world in which those artists worked, a time where people were not constantly overwhelmed with internet surfing, instant information, and hyper-saturation, no longer exists. The very real beliefs and social climate that compelled the modernist vivisection of biological forms into studies of the new has now given way to a world where both biology and the new are radically mistrusted and seen as empty concepts which expand, fold, and collage together into a fabric of constant disruption.

With Curry, you feel an engagement with this thinking and that can be interesting, as in the case of Mark Grotjahn, but with Curry you also feel the burden of basic formal deficiencies. Grotjahn seems on the same plane as the artists he critiques and reinvents, and my sense is that Curry is not. For instance as you walk around Curry’s new sculptures at David Kordansky, there is a vantage point in each where one finds the simplicity of Curry's sculptural understanding—there is a vantage point, usually if you just stand to the side of the piece, where a few rigid, angular moves determine and structure the sculpture. For instance, Bcklmnmppe, 2010, (shown below) is supported by two pieces of steel, perpendicular to the floor, which stand with small footprint in front and a wide footprint in back. Through these two rigid structures runs another piece of steel in the shape of a “c.” In other words, it’s a tricycle -- small wheel in the front, two in the back -- with a cross bar. Not exactly a dynamic framework.

None of the sculptors that Curry is discussed in relation to (Calder and Noguchi mostly) would ever allow themselves such simple angles in their work. Their understanding of space and what it takes to make a sculpture interesting to viewer was more expansive. As you walk around their work, different angles provide changing vistas and formal relationships. But in Curry’s world, a world that is apparently more complex, we find work that is simpler and not as thought out. We find work that instead of being sculpturally pushed and amped up by the new flows of information and technology, simply wears that information like wallpaper, like a bright burst of surface paint bound to fade. Though Curry is placed firmly by writers in the space of the contemporary, shape-shifting artist that “bridges the space between multiple mediums” and provides a mediation on the contemporary moment through accumulation of imagery so much at risk of losing its meaning as to be in a point of crisis, he feels to be at a point where he should go deeper, much deeper into the forms that he distrusts.

Scott Short

2010-06-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

Scott Short

Christopher Grimes Gallery

Through June 19th

I have a book throwing problem. Whenever I encounter thinking that makes me furious, there the books go, sailing across the room. Sometimes they hit things that need not be hit, sometimes they don’t. Anyway, I get upset, and one art book I remember throwing is Brandon Joseph’s Random Order, a book on Robert Rauschenberg. Joseph basically makes the claim that Rauschenberg picked up on how images were starting to function inside of spectacle culture, namely that images had lost all significance and depth and now purposed themselves merely as empty containers of illusionary meaning. Images simply bombard us, reconfiguring according to the function of the market and consumer culture. So when Rauschenberg cut his jumbles of silkscreen images from this flowing tapestry and glut of information, by removing them, he made a political gesture to disrupt the seamless, democratic flow of meaningless images. In doing this, however, Rauschenberg does not achieve meaning, but instead, the disruption simply shows us the structure of an un-escapable spectacle culture.

And the book went flying. The thing that bothered me was that Joseph willfully wrote out all personal depth and information from Rauschenberg’s silkscreens, that he makes no allowance that an image of Kennedy, or Venus, or a weather balloon could mean anything personal for Rauschenberg – this individual rubbish did not seem to matter to Joseph and his tired October thinking just made me angry. I don’t think that Joseph fails to see these facts about Rauschenberg, he even mentions them in the book from time to time, but they just don’t matter to him, all that personal stuff is just a hangover of expressionist impulses and mid-century narcissism, mere footnotes that can lead to confusion when wider, more engrossing facts and general, weighty issues of culture are stake. This bothers me. It is like telling one to focus on a loud bulldozer but to not get overly involved with the engine parts, the ignition switches, or any of the things that make the machine operate.

These things came back into my mind with the work of Scott Short, a very interesting painter whose work I have been familiar with for sometime. Short uses a photocopier (early on an analogue device and now digital) and builds up sheets of what I guess one could call the remnants of imperfect light containment on the copier’s surface. As parts of the page darken, expand, and flow through the light registry, Short chooses moments that he finds aesthetically interesting, turns the moments into a transparency, projects the image on a canvas, and painstakingly paints bit by bit until he has a copy of a copy. Admittedly, just thinking about the process, it is hard to believe this not insufferable, tedious, and outright boring work (sort of grad-student tricks performed to avoid painting and expression, the kind of art souped up on Walter Benjamin without the benefit of his authentic emotions). However, Short is interesting and the paintings get better and better.

Now, I think about that theory of Brandon Joseph, and that endless rush of information that forms a leveled, heterogeneous tapestry of over-extended boredom across our lives when it comes to Short. Subsequently, I can think about Short choice of imagery as perhaps a choice from just such a tapestry. Actually, it is much easier for me to buy the argument about Short than it is to buy it about Rauschenberg. The photocopier’s remnants are, after all, randomly determined and sprawl out into patterns form according to a number of conditions that are difficult to fathom. Random order indeed.

However, Short, like Rauschenberg, makes choices, and there he is, performing painting inside of gluts of information. He is looking for old things like visual punch and beauty. He is not afraid to get involved with the optical effects he finds in the random passages of black and white. Honestly, at the level of surface and image, there is no difference between the passages that Short chooses to paint and the passages that he choose to exclude other than that they are special to him, that they do something for him that the excluded passages don’t. The choice matters. We choose to care about images and that is what makes them meaningful. Our ability to focus, garner our attention towards them, animates them in a way that the market and the glut cannot completely kill. There is a significance to that and outcomes in Short’s paintings, so reminiscent but not quite like works by Christopher Wool or even, brace yourself, the simmering fields of Jules Olitski, carry this significance.

There’s a crisis of meaning going on here, there is a resistance to human life being merely a matter of technology or merely a matter of surface configurations of images, just as Joseph read Rauschenberg. At the same time, however, the resistance is not the point, and it is not merely to show us the structure of an in-escapable system. There is something excessive and joyful going here. That’s the point, that’s what Short gets out of an unlikely machine like a photocopier. He’s managed to find moments of resonance in the glut and wash. Those moments are deep and not surface, built on old things and not new criteria of image play and politics.

Tim Berresheim

2010-06-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

Tim Berresheim: Phoenix - The Guilty Pleasure

Patrick Painter

Closed April 3rd, 2010

In the May, 2010 issue of Art Review, I invite you to read my review of Tim Berresheim's last show at Patrick Painter. This is a link to the article online. I also wrote about Berresheim in early 2009. Here is that link.

Robert Lazzarini: American Facts

2010-05-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

Robert Lazzarini

Honor Fraser Gallery

Closed May 12, 2010

I’ve been trying to write about Robert Lazzarini for weeks now and it has been difficult. His sculptures of guns, knives, and brass knuckles (the least strong of the bunch) are a disruptive perceptual experience. They are fuzzy in the gallery space, suspended before the eye as something not quite seen, not quite graspable. So busy spinning in a familiar world suddenly made strange, my sentences and words found no traction. Words do exactly the opposite of what Lazzarini’s sculptures do -- they anchor things, they take experience and settle it down. Lazzarini’s sculptures are unsettling.

I came up with many clever fixes for Lazzarini: phenomenology (many writers have done this well so no need for me to rehash it), how Lazzarini shouldn’t avoid talking about Hans Holbein’s skull distortion in The Ambassadors, 1533 because it is important that his work not be seen as an anamorphism(you’ve got to always save an article to write for the future), how Lazzarini could be positioned as a sculptor somewhere between Robert Irwin and Charles Ray (I’d end up just talking about Ray). Thinking through these topics, however, could not get at what I wanted -- the work’s quiet nature, the paradox of how these apparently humble objects could have such large philosophical ambitions yet not find much reason to fret about it. They are not flashy though guns and knives are supposed to be -- they are some of the most matter of fact objects I’ve ever seen.

Which brings me to Robert Frost’s poem Mowing, written in 1913. Please bear with me. I may have lost you at the mention of Frost. If so, I can’t help you and that's a shame. You can read the poem here if you wish.

Mowing is about tools, specifically the scythe, a long blade swung aerobically in a half circle, which cuts long stems of wheat or other grains with a muffled rasp of noise comparable to someone dragging their feet through gravel. The sound, Frost mentions, is the only sound – “there was never a sound beside the wood but one” – and what I think he is getting at is a very common Frost theme, the cold disregard of nature for our activities, the chilling thought that the sounds we make are ours alone, sounds mean nothing to the wood.

There is no romance, nothing supernatural, no need for dreams or “easy gold.” The simple American images offer their power without fanfair, a technique that was mastered by William Carlos Williams and, I would argue, by New York School poets like Frank O’Hara, who choose experience in the raw and in the present rather experience funneled through imagination and nostalgia. What struck me, quite strangely, is that Frost chose a tool, something grasped and employed, to draw attention to the sound of our lives and to set the philosophic ground for everything that we are involved with. What an American thing to do, what a practical solution.

With the interaction found in Mowing, that strange mix of man and earth from which the scythe functions, comes paradoxically the full weight of mystery. The circuit made by us and objects is that from which our strange purpose on the earth sparks. Our tools split, organize, and adjust things and this is foreign to the wood. The sound of the scythe scares “a bright green snake,” it is inherently violent, yet it whispers to the ground. It doesn’t speak. It whispers. Frost makes this very clear -- there is a difference between speaking and whispering.

Lazzarini’s sculptures are also tight-lipped tools, they whisper, they do not speak. I am convinced their quiet nature, their embeddedness as things and in things, speak to the same issues of which Frost speaks. What is the difference, I wonder, between the scythe, slicing wheat with a sound foreign to the wood, and Lazzarini’s sculptures, which slice our normal perceptual space, piercing the skin of our lives with a pinprick of silent oddity? Like the green snake (isn't it wonderful that the snake is green in the poem!), I was a bit spooked by my encounter with Lazzarini’s work, and I feel the quiet violence of distinctions that mean everything in life, a feeling promoted by the use of guns and knives.

It is almost diabolical how man’s odd gift of consciousness tempts him to rule himself an oddity of nature, tempts him to see himself apart from things. For Frost, he is apart and nature doesn’t care (see poem Design for perhaps the most horrifying example). However, for Lazzarini, man co-creates what he and nature is, the connection is deep and not as separate as Frost’s world view. The quiet intimacy of Lazzarini’s sculptures cut things open a bit, even retain the simple violence of our existence, yet the shift we encounter, that fuzzy bit of math and optics in front of us at the gallery, subtle though it is, finds both nature (space, time, found reality) and man bleeding, but bleeding slowly, learning a bit about their existence through their sluggish but ancient fight.

And that, it seems, gets to the quiet. That is what I need, to cope with what I saw in Lazzarini’s work. They are matter of fact because they deal in facts, some of the strangest and deepest facts. “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows,” as Frost wrote, “My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.”

Judy Ledgerwood

2010-04-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

Judy Ledgerwood

1301 PE

Closed April 20,2010

There is a passage in my favorite art biography, Seeing is Forgetting The Name of the Thing on Sees, where Robert Irwin comes up against the mysterious world of what he calls “power” in painting. He experiences an odd moment of comparison, specifically a large James Brooks with “five major shapes in it” in contrast to a “funny little Guston kind of scrumbly painting.” Irwin was intimidated, infuriated, and humbled by that “goddamn Guston” – the Guston outwrestled and “just took over.” “The Brooks fell into the background,” Irwin said, “And I learned something about . . . some people call it ‘the inner life of the painting,’ all that romantic stuff, and I guess a way of talking about it. But shapes on a painting are just shapes on a canvas unless they start acting on each other and really, in a sense, multiplying. A good painting has a gathering, interactive build-up to it.”

I recently had a similar experience myself and it is bothering me. The story is basically this -- I’ve seen dozens of Judy Ledgerwood paintings in my life, mostly in Chicago where I lived for 3 years, and I finally felt one. I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve talked to others about the works, and they don’t seem to be impressed. One person said they were “trippy,” another that they were “hallucinatory and very psychedelic.” Others might call them 1970s wallpaper gone Bridget Riley or even that they are Phillip Taaffes that are less moody and open to having more fun. All of these descriptions say very little and compute references into unsatisfying solutions.

If I would add up my own list of bullet points, I would say a Ledgerwood is an interesting blend of optics (how your visual hardware works on a scientific level), the tension between decoration and abstraction (a jargony trap which I’ll discuss in a minute), and handmade joy. They are bright patterns, undulating like vertical waves at times, folding in on themselves at others, wrapping, and sometimes suspending their movements like fabric swinging from a laundry line. The smallest ones, my favorite being Tangarine sun and summer sea, 2010 (seen above) invite the eye almost like a pulsing button, growing bright then dark, waiting to be pushed, needing to be pushed, though the reason is unclear.

People rarely speak of power in painting anymore. Actually, they speak this way quite a lot, just not on paper and definitely not in any major art magazine. Admittedly, these moments of surprise and power when it comes to painting are hard to articulate and most of the terms that were coined to speak of it have now been discounted or at least are out of fashion. A modernist of the Michael Fried variety, for instance, would have described this power as “presence,” and will use phenomenology (sometimes Merleau-Ponty, sometimes Heidegger) to describe the moment -- how it aligns you to yourself (if this is possible), how you can be “in the painting,” suspended in and immersed in looking. This unifies the physical with the mystery and result is an extraordinary thing – a painting that justifies itself through explicating, enacting, and centering physical reality.

Other commentators, like Kurt Varnedoe, former MoMA curator of painting and sculpture, would maybe talk about the moment historically, that the power is a confluence of a particular program and history of painting that comes together into a new and fascinating area of connections. The parsing and categorizing brain, caught up in new networks of meanings, will feel overwhelmed.

The majority of official writers in the arts, however, make a living by beating a confession out of this moment without actually talking about it directly. “Presence” has been replaced by circumstantial and situated meaning. For instance, when Fried thinks that he is feeling something, a critical person would then say that the feeling is an illusion produced by a web of situations that put him in that particular place and there is no way to verify or guarantee that the feeling will ever happen again – there is no criteria for determining when this feeling should happen. A Jackson Pollock might as well be a pan of scrambled eggs, to use Rosalind Krauss’ informe track.

I suspect, and have been suspecting for sometime, that this way of thinking leads to another phenomenon, a way of talking around such moments that is endemic to much contemporary criticism. In order to explain away power, they arrange the painting in the middle of a variety of categories – between representation and abstraction, between design and formlessness (I did this earlier), between order and chaos, somewhere in the space between Pollock and tablecloths, between authenticity and simulation, between reality and illusion. The habit then is to show how the artist (insert name here) dodges these categories and presents something else, a viable hinterland in which you are not really standing but evaporating and being remade at each moment. Writers that take this track not only greatly exaggerate – for instance, does a Dash Snow collage of Saddam Hussein’s testicles really dodge categories and show us the contingencies of the visual experience, or is it just the secretions of an overgrown idiot? In other words, we explain away actual experience in favor of rhetoric that fits.

Now the belief is, I think, that having something fall in-between categories of assessment animates the art and gives it life, gives you a new space to think about that is not straightforward but instead a complicated thing. This is absolutely true. However, to truly exist in that space is a difficult thing. To be honest, when I view a Ledgerwood, I don’t feel in-between anything. The paintings simply are, and to move from that experience into rhetoric hurts both you and the painting in a way. I admit I am sympathetic to Fried’s reading of presence, and I am also partial to the way Bob Irwin looked at Guston. It seems we must talk about the fact that the image is acting on us in a physical manner and that the reality of that encounter is not merely a matter of tricks or illusions, nor is it a simple assertion of our optical hardware. What did Irwin mean when he spoke about shapes and colors acting on each other, why does the Ledgerwood button pulse for me? If it were simply a matter of optics and a scientific matter, then what rises up in me to resist this reading? Why do I then feel downright humbled by the fact that the images achieve this optical effect by gestures of the brush, casual patterns of the craftsman and not the machine?

These are not easy questions to answer, but they certainly are the things I have to consider when confronting Judy Ledgerwood.

Rachel Whiteread in Art Review

2010-04-20T09:15:00.000-07:00

Rachel Whiteread: Drawings

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Through April 25th

In the April, 2010 issue of Art Review, I invite you to read my review of Rachel Whiteread: Drawings at the Hammer Museum. This is a link to the article online. I disagree completely with the idea that Whiteread's work is an unremarkable footnote on the work of Bruce Nauman. I also disagree with the idea that the Hammer show of her drawings is a market driven or branded initiative that justifies showing minor work at the expense of other, perhaps more deserving, art. I find the drawings moving, important, and geeky -- which is what the Hammer does best.

Thanks for reading

Miller Updegraff

2010-03-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

Miller Updegraff

Michael Benevento

Through May 1, 2010

(Reposted from Artslant.com)

A critical shortcoming of mine is to be so overwhelmed by what things look like and what they remind me of, that I forget what they are. What’s worse, is that I burden younger artists, who are just trying to get their toe in the door of this impossibly silly but important artworld, with the weight of those that came before them – I perhaps unfairly went after Steven Bankhead at Circus because he couldn’t live up to his Barnett Newman references in a clear manner; I unleashed the mastery of Jasper Johns on Dan Bayless at Francois Ghebaly. Another part of me, however, thinks that this is exactly what I should be doing, that we are after all, aiming for mastery and further depth, that we all should be aiming at history. The poet Donald Hall tells his students in workshops simply this, “Try to be as good a poet as George Herbert.” I guess I am of the same school. I wish I was as good a critic as Randall Jarrell. I’ll keep working at it and tell you how it goes.

So when I look at Miller Updegraff’s work at Michael Benevento, I absolutely have to think of Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans, and Johannes Kars. In other words, the new image painters of Germany using washing, fading images to speak of a tortured history they have difficulty (and rightly so) staring right in the face. For painters like Richter, Tuymans, and Kars, history is such a place that, on one hand, cannot be grasped in totality and, on another hand, loses its effect if rendered too overtly. To stare unfettered at war, torture, murder, and death is like staring at pornography, and one of painting’s chief virtues is that it can displace the unholy directness of photography. The bluntness of the gratuitous looking deadens exactly the part of a person that needs to be developed to cope with trauma and horrible history. This is the prayer of these painters.

Updegraff too shows history in a fog, barely visible on unprimed canvas and bled through with medium and washes. Updegraff’s pictures flicker in and out of view. However, Updegraff shows the history of America and the masculine spaces of the early 20th century – the heavy set, cigar-laced aristocratic perches of Evelyn Waugh and the blood-stained boxing rings of George Bellows. Some of Updegraff’s paintings appear like police snapshots of the underworld, others show secret parties like Weegee's voyeuristic snaps, but all come across as takes on photographs. I currently have no doubt that like Tuymans, Richter, and Kars, Updegraff is comfortable putting paintings up against photography as a manager and interpreter of history.

And it would be easy to feel slightly insecure about the weight of our own American history in the face of what the Germans have to cope with in their work. It would be even easier to write Updegraff’s work off as having the mere fantasy of depth, of aping off the styles of more distinguished and embedded masters. However, I hesitate to go so far. While Updegraff can be accused of generalizing masculinity and reducing it down to a series of historical tropes and clichés, his manner of presentation is on to something. It certainly is valid to stare into dark hidden spaces of the past and to watch them appear as incomplete specters in front of us. It is enjoyable and productive to stare into those distant places.

Work of this nature has a lot to live up, however. It takes mastery on the level of a Karin Mamma Andersson to muse on the particular traumas of Sweden, a Cormac McCarthy or Don Delillo to revive the blood soaked origins and structure of the United States, a Ritcher or a W.G. Sebald to process the complexity of Germany. I would love to see Updegraff go deeper, focus on the masculine as a compulsion and legacy whose fat fingers still soils us today. I would love for the proceedings to be more studied, focused, less evocative of other masters and more personal. I’d love to say an Updegraff looks like an Updegraff. He’ll get there -- there is much talent here.

Sean Duffy in Art Review

2010-03-24T10:26:00.000-07:00

Sean Duffy: Can't Stop it

Susanne Vielmetter Gallery

Closed December 19, 2009

In the March 2010 issue of ArtReview, I invite you to read my piece on Sean Duffy's last show at Susanne Vielmetter. This is a link to the article online. Thanks for reading.

Rachel Foullon

2010-03-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

Rachel Fouloun: An Accounting

ltd los angeles

Through May 7th

(Reposted from ArtSlant.com)

Rachel Foullon thinks about rural spaces: the dank packed dust of a barn tack room, horse harnesses and halters hanging from the ramshackle hooks, the dark hole of a hay loft. This rural poetry has haunted poets and thinkers for centuries, some idealizing those spaces and making them the symbol of lost innocence, others finding them quaint and beautiful.

Foullon has another take on the countryside and rural, namely as the platform and backbone of economies. Whereas someone like Dan Graham noticed how the site specific interventions of minimalism meant little without some thinking about bureaucracy and about how government, zoning, capitalism, and other forms of order can impact a space, Foullon might say all those concerns start even earlier — in a barn and on a farm. A sculptural space instead might be thought of through the futures market: how gold, wheat, corn, maize, cotton, and cattle impact global life.

I find this premise fascinating and current, a platform from which a multiplicity of implications can spiral outwards. For instance, when the Obama Administration released its budget, one victim of the cuts were what they administration called “wealthy farmers.” This is another way of talking about subsidies. “We can’t afford it,” became the mantra. But the backlash, in this case, was justified. Cut cotton subsidies, for instance, and the market for cotton swings to East Africa and bottom-line farmers will cut their cotton production and thus jobs. The bottom-line consumer will go wherever it finds the cheapest cotton and therefore Africa. The cuts affect an entire chain of the economy. From another viewpoint, one could argue that cutting subsidies to big farms is justified, shifting the market to small organic farms and taking money out of the hands of the wealthy, shifting it around a bit. To look at it a third way, if Africa is stimulated, then that might be a humanitarian mission, bringing parts of Africa out of starvation and above the global poverty line.Who are Americans to subdue Africa using money it doesn’t have? The issue is complicated.

And what does any of this have to do with Foullon’s work? Well, I would argue a great deal. If we are to take the format of her presentation seriously, then we need to think about how rural life can extend all the way into an art gallery. She has made so many curious decisions that demand an aggressive reading. For example, the ceiling heights and the placements of walls and joints affect the placement of her wall hangings. There's a sense of determinism like that found in early Frank Stella and a Donald Judd-like precision in how the cedar beams and barn slats are fabricated (I should say, politely, that most barns these days are metal and wooden slats belong only to the past). The cloths that Foullon dyes are employed and left sagging like Robert Morris or Richard Serra felt hangings. There is a sense, in other words, of order here, whether eternal or zoned, it pervades the gallery.

But this order is tempered with rough-hewn memorial details that collect. Those same cloths have the menstrual connotations of Louise Bourgeois, they are stained and organic like a Eva Hesse, full of feminine labial lips and curves. I, innocently, thought of the Depression-era photos of Walker Evans and the fetish-like description of rural gear of James Agee. Ultimately however, I got to the fluid current of these proceedings: the rural to Foullon exists in an earth mother-ish manner as much as it does as an element of an economy.

The accounting, for Foullon, is both about numbers and an accounting in general, an accounting for how things are. Thus those stalks of corn in the dirt in Iowa, birthed by the earth mother and tempered and arranged by our hands, extend widely to the economy and as far as Africa, or even further, into the remote, distant, and disconnected confines of the art gallery.

I’ve over-read Foullon’s work. I freely admit it.

When you go to the show, it will take generous leaps of imagination to make it to these thoughts. Most will see just a few lightly varnished constructivist designs with some sagging cloth, an unremarkable curved fence accented with a folded studio drop cloth with vaginal overtones. Things will look slightly minimalist, distant, and a bit weird. But, that said, my over-reading is my dream for this work, and even perhaps, Foullon’s intention for it.

Lee Ufan

2010-02-01T15:54:00.000-08:00

Lee Ufan

Blum and Poe

Through February 20^th

I felt it was an important moment last year when Dan Graham’s pavilions roughly occupied, a few months later, the same space at MOCA as Louise Bourgeois’ cells. The space, for me, still quivers with the lessons of that interaction. With Graham’s anonymous, cold spaces, I felt how the raw details of a physical encounter with a space determines movement and grounds and dictates human behavior. With Bourgeois, I learned how the memory of space that’s been touched and lived in perhaps is equally important in behavior. It’s the clinical contextualization of Duchamp’s Urinal counter-posed with the soiled teddies of Mike Kelley. The world means something, but something quite different with us in it.

I experienced another two pronged art encounter recently, this time positioned between Blum and Poe’s old and new spaces, and between the young sculptor Matt Johnson and Lee Ufan. In 2006, Johnson placed a rock in the old gallery, and I still don’t have any idea whether the rock was found or sculpted. Neither would surprise me and the distinction in this case is not important. What is important is that at the time, after seeing Johnson’s car muffler Pieta, his sand crab, and his magic eye painting, with all the cheekiness that these works brought along with them, the rock smiled at me. Not only did it smile at me, it smirked. The rock was personified, and I thought the rock was kind of a punk.

Now in 2010, Ufan too has rocks in Blum and Poe, this time the new space, but they do not smirk. Actually the rocks stay rocks and the pieces of metal in the gallery stay metal. Moving forward, the paint stays paint and the canvas, canvas. Ufan is present in the work, but not as a wit or as a guide for materials into metaphor. Instead, something quite different from Johnson, Graham, or Bourgeois is occurring. Ufan is not cold like Graham and his goal is not to point out the impact of Bureaucrats on public spaces, and yet, he is not speaking of trauma and its impact on a spatial relationship like Bourgeois. One has to think that he believes in the impact of space and things, but that there is a more basic and fundamental relationship being elucidated, underneath personal history, underneath politics, and all joking aside.

What this means is quite old and quite different from what we are used to in the United States, and I hate that I am only coming upon Ufan now, even though he’s been working since the 1960s. Ufan is difficult to position in the larger cultural fabric we find in the U.S. We are not exactly known at the moment, especially after the market crash, as a country of restraint, discipline, and close attunement to vastly important but minutely scaled principles. Yet Ufan is exactly the show to see in these times, a show that is so ancient that it is well beyond old fashioned and into timeless. We don’t like the word “timeless” in contemporary art. It smacks of universals, of rock solid things below and beyond experience that outlive experience. These things, it is more in vogue to think, are merely products of mental frameworks, of positions, of ideologies, of how we are standing and looking. It is illusion to think that they are fixed, but instead, they are quite pliable, based on conditions that can be shifted.

I don’t think that Ufan would disagree with most of these statements, for his work definitely is about conditions and about the human relationship to the conditions of the world. However, we must account for several things in Ufan’s work that seem to lie outside of ideologies and positions, concepts like weight, distance, direction, and speed, all physical concepts that affect rocks and mountains and water as much as they effect us. That Ufan can think about these concepts with painting is extraordinary and that he can do it without some morbid fantasy of the “world without us” is even more impressive.

Ufan the painter, in his rituals and in his approach to painting, makes the painting process as “real” as walking, swimming, or any other physical activity in the world. Note, for instance, how you are drawn, along with Ufan, into the density and weight of his large individual brushstrokes, the way your body and your eye move at the same time, almost like Richard Serra’s steel impacts your movement through its inner spaces. Notice also how the primal register of “heaviness” maps from Ufan’s rocks onto his steel onto you and how you find yourself in a position as an object in relation to other objects, but importantly, also as an object capable to acknowledging this relationship. Finally, let your eyes and body flicker and quicken according to the speed of Ufan’s brushstrokes in his line and dot paintings, and how the exhaustion of paint on the brush (it’s running out) can mimic the real time movement of your eyes and body. I speculate (call me crazy) that the careful viewer might feel a shudder of the transience of material, their own material even, a whisper of the reality of death.

Ufan is so different from his American contemporaries. For instance, there is so spatially to consider, as when we face the immersive scapes of Barnet Newman yet Ufan’s canvas register more like objects and less like a mirage, his brush strokes are less like fissures in a mist and more like weighty accretions on a surface. Also, Ufan’s is not a game of calibrated, material experiments intent on causing materials to register like materials, like Frank Stella’s “I wanted to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas” paintings. Instead, Ufan’s paint, as in his Line and Point paintings, start dense and fade into nothing, asserting themselves with a new full brush and then drying out, intent on showing us the ritual of painting. Stella has nothing to do with ritual -- he was more into draining Ab Ex of its wailing and grinding of teeth, trading expression for reality but not a very poetic one. Now that we’ve said ritual, however, perhaps we can bring in the comparison of Robert Ryman, who pragmatically used materials as materials, exhausting possibilities, and another person that likes the ritual of painting. But again with Ufan, the comparison falls short of the mark. Often, Ryman’s strokes feel simply like paint, pulled free from composition, applied by a human but it doesn’t really matter whether or not they were applied by a human.

With Ufan, it is easy to see the validity of the art experience, how it is physically grounded in the reality of things and how we, as humans, are tied and part of this reality. The lack of ideology does not bother me -- in fact it comforting to know that the things in the world in a sense impact out involvement with them but do not ultimately depend on our involvement with them. It is great to know that painting – so often belittled for its inability to think about such things – can be part of this truth. Our involvement with reality, it should be noted however, does not come as a loss of some sort of primal purity, but as an extended truth. We used to be more attuned to art’s capacity to present such primal thoughts, we believed in its material and metaphorical capacity to do so.

For instance, in his classic essay, when Leo Steinberg spoke of Picasso’s skulls as having weight, we knew what that meant visually and metaphorically, that the physical weight of the paint, in a sense, lessened the skull as a metaphor and asserted it more as a reality, and thus too our comfort with skulls unraveled as well, moving from the skull of Adam at the base of the Crucifixion (the skull rooted in the promise of new life or new covenant) and more towards the painful reality of things “case closed,” the things that receive “weight” not from the promise of eternal life but from the finality of death. There is a flavor of this thought in the work of Ufan.

Neil Beloufa in ArtReview

2009-12-04T17:14:00.000-08:00

Neil Beloufa

Chung King Project

Closed October 24, 2009

In the December 2009 issue of ArtReview, I invite you to read my piece on Neil Beloufa's' last show at Chung King Project. This is a link to the article online. Thanks for reading.

Guido van der Werve

2009-11-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

Guido van der Werve

Marc Foxx

Through November 28

(disclaimer: this essay is not to be confused with the review of the show to follow in next month's ArtReview)

A favorite of mine is Adalbert Stifter’s children’s story Rock Crystal from 1853. Stifter is not a familiar name in America, mostly because other than a few anthologized stories and his novel Indian Summer, he is out of print and virtually invisible to American audiences. I came across Stifter through studying my favorite writer German author W.G. Sebald and looking at Anselm Kiefer --Stifter appears as one of Kiefer’s German heroes. Rock Crystal, republished by the New York Review of Books, is in the German legacy of romantic writing and is a simple story that borders on a folk tale but with enough scope to move beyond the ordinary and into another haunting place.

Two delightful children, Conrad and his younger sister Sanna, visit their grandparents on Christmas Eve, and on the journey back to their parents, darkness falls on their mountain pass. They become lost and walk the crags and crooked rocks. They are obviously in danger, but Stifter does not call attention to this menace, instead letting description of the landscape simply absorb the children. The tenderness with which the children are treated in the story -- by their grandparents (presents and kisses), by the loving description of the care Conrad and Sanna show for each, and by Stifter’s crisp and exact prose – make their vulnerability and presence on the mountain terrible. The result is not suspense exactly, but instead, you sense that something sweeping and monumental is at stake in the lives of these children. Throughout the trouble, the surface of the mountain echoes with the occasional tone of the village church bell, relaying the promise of the savior on Christmas as hope but also and more importantly, I would argue, demonstrating the odds against the little ones. It is an invocation to care for their safety. The bell is but a din on this thick snow, but its harmony is as loving as Conrad’s embrace of Sanna in a cave for their mutual warmth.

I speak of Stifter because the tone of the church bell somehow made it through over a century to register on my skin as I watched a contemporary video project, Guido van der Werve’s new project at Marc Foxx, titled simply nummer twaalf, 2009 or number 12. In the video, I found myself observing another vulnerable figure in a treacherous landscape, van der Werve himself wandering alone far from civilization on the regenerating but still burnt surface of Mount St. Helens and along San Andreas fault, with its hard scrabble creosote bushes and fine gravel paths. Instead of the church bell in Rock Crystal, however, van der Werve’s punctuations come from a piano of his own creation made of a chess set. When each off kilter note hits the soundtrack, a chess move notation appears on the right side of the screen. While van der Werve has never heard of Stifter (I asked him), I feel that his piano and its off beat tone somehow relates to Stifer’s tone. What the tone means is what interests me about the work.

From the details of the piece, we come to an understanding of the tone. Van der Werve starts in a chess salon (the same salon that Duchamp and Fisher frequented) where he is playing chess with an orchestra playing a set behind him. It is a long shot, but soon transitions to the artist in a small shed, staring off moody into space intoning apparently hard facts about nature. One observation is about the multitude of the stars and how overwhelming the number is, how a human could never list even a fraction of them if they said the names, one by one, through their entire lifetime. Another observation is about music, how only stringed instruments can reach perfect tones while pianos are all out of key, that they are tuned basically only according to how a piano is supposed to sound like and not against any mathematically or physically correct tone.

The camera then picks the artist up in its frame as a tiny figure, insignificant on the rough terrain. When we see the artist small in the landscape and hear the tone of the piano hit, the conclusion seems to be that humans are themselves out of tune and only measurable to themselves, that they are rather paltry and insignificant curiosities who survive only according to the logic of strategy, according to the logic of the chess set. Van der Werve, the dour artist, walks the walk of humanity, clumsy in its attempts to fit with a cosmic scene of upheaval, violence, and elemental sweeps that can brush it away in an instant and without any conscience.

This bleak outlook is very melancholic, as if blocked by a buildup of black bile in the body, and van der Werve is hardly the first to take this stance on cosmic insignificance and elemental danger. Nor is he the first to describe humans as out of tune with the world or as playing some sort of Russian roulette chess game with the natural world. In fact, there is a certain mood with which nummer twaalf, 2009 is presented that is off putting but familiar in contemporary art -- its lack of energy, its grumpy Northern European ennui. Van der Werve does not take to the seismic fury and danger of nature, for instance, with the verve or resolve that someone like the poet Robinson Jeffers pursues it, where the will can assert itself, although to ultimate futility, in way that is positive. Neither does van der Werve’s piece offer that there is particular much to live for in this world of cold facts and humans out of tune with their surrounding.

And so I thought of Rock Crystal and how its picture of humanity is different. I think the story is poignant because it is part of the Romanticism that van der Werve has adapted to contemporary life in his work, but striking in its contrasts. The first thing I noticed, for instance, is that it is impossible to care for van der Werve’s fragile, vulnerable adult body in the way that I care for the children in the Rock Crystal. He has done nothing to endear himself to me. He’s just gloomy and alone – his assertion of insignificance leads to exactly that. I can’t get sentimental about van der Werve like I can about the children.

I love that the word sentimental comes up. Also, I love it that you could argue against my point by saying “What is significant about the children, why should they have any precedence in the landscape? When it comes right down to it, they are alone too, they are lost in an uncaring universe, they are infinitely tiny in the face of the stars and they are out of tune?” And I would say we care about them and we believe we are more in this landscape than chess players because we are invested in it, we have a history in it that guides us, we can choose care and be cared for. We have a stake in things that requires our energy, that requires our services.

Van der Werve’s ennui does little to assuage our grief or promote our happiness. It promotes what it claims is a bald, raw truth about nature and seems to claim that simply presenting this truth is a virtue. It misses the point. We are supposed to employ facts, we are supposed to use facts, not just depressingly reconfigure them on the chess board and hope we make it. The tone from the chess piano is an interesting but inferior tone. That’s why when the Rock Crystal bell chimes -- the bell affirming vulnerability and fragility but reminding us that vulnerability comes from investment, history, caring, engagement, -- it is a proper bell, a bell that though foreign amongst the rocks and the caverns and the shards of ice, is in tune with things. We are not bestial anomalies in the world. Humans are stringed instruments and not pianos. We are the habit of the world and have purpose in the world. Our lot is not moody displacement but engaged dwelling.

Jason Yates in Art Review

2009-09-09T14:23:00.000-07:00

Jason Yates

Circus Gallery, Los Angeles

Closed May 23, 2009

In the Summer 2009 issue of ArtReview, I invite you to read my piece on Jason Yates' last show at Circus Gallery. This is a link to the article online. Thanks for reading.

Larry Johnson

2009-08-18T16:24:00.000-07:00

Larry Johnson

Hammer Museum

Through September 6

Much is made of Larry Johnson as cynic, and I have lambasted cynicism over and over on this blog from Anne Collier to Walead Beshty. I have documented my contempt for that type of thinking. My basic issue is that cynicism, although often clever in its analysis and presentation of often disheartening effects of culture, is often just a self-defeating enterprise that doesn’t allow much room for error, much belief in humanity as something to live for or up to, and does not allow much “feeling our way into the world.” Cynicism instead finds its kicks in simply being clever and takes being clever as virtue when it should be more ambitious, when it should believe in something. It’s pronouncements are total but never affirming or life giving. Cynics are fantastic at taking things apart but are not able to put things together with much conviction. I often butt my head against this way of thinking, and its philosophical roots have always been troubling to me.

Johnson is labeled a cynic by many, and it would be easy to agree. Cynicism runs through his work. One needs only to look at works like Untitled (The Study), 1998 and Untitled (Nathan Lane), 1998. In these works, modernist sculpture as a cultural form is not distinguished from commercial signage -- all have raw visual equivalency and therefore the value of the forms is flattened. Nothing has anymore meaning than anything else. That said, the introduction of Johnson’s signature at the bottom of the Nathan Lane piece receives this same fate – there is nothing sacred about creation, about the artist, all of these things are bound up by the engine of culture, the same culture that created vapid celebrities and Hallmark Cards, empty vessels for unfulfilled desires. Untitled (Landscape), 1998 brings this thinking to its most chilling conclusion in showing David Smiths, Donald Judds, and again commercial signs littered in a bleak grey landscape. All forms are removed from the systems of meaning that contained them -- they are all defeated by meaninglessness.

I initially wanted to write Johnson off for such a bleak outlook, but in his retrospective at the Hammer Museum, I found all sorts of human things coming forth in formally dynamic and fascinating ways. I was surprised by Johnson. I was surprised by how uneasy his work is with its own means, how each piece almost willfully struggles against itself. In the end, Johnson’s use of irony, satire, photographic processes, commercial signage (all of the processes typically seen as complicit in separating us from our lives, placing us at a distance from ourselves, and forcing us into a constant state of inert critical detachment) slowly unravels, fills full of clumsy holes, and comes out the other side, downright heartening and human (not in a greeting card sort of way, but in a hard earned sort of way).

I fixated on one extraordinarily powerful work, flatly but tellingly called Untitled (Winter Me), 1990. The work is classic Johnson, offering a text settled but plangent in serene scene of stark graphic winter trees, snow, and mountains. The text is loud and overbearing, screaming the confession of a celebrity on the phone with his agents – everybody wants him, everybody flatters him, they beg to create anything and everything around him. The celebrity conveys his story in punchy, obnoxious call and response narration, punctuated over and over by the word “Me” – “Life with Me, This is Me, Me She Wrote, Me fashion creation” and ending with “Hour after hour, offer after offer it goes I have no time to stop and smell the rose named for Me.”

The assertion of the Me over and over in the cult of celebrity paradoxically destroys the self or individual. “What do we know of celebrities really,” Johnson seems to be saying here, “The more I see them, the less I know of them.” His use of language in the piece demonstrates the emptying of the Me masterfully. Johnson’s irony and satire changes the calm surface of the winter landscape (typically an engine for self-affirmation or greeting card solace) into a vehicle for celebrity critique, but the remarkable thing is that the work throbs with human sympathy and heat. Johnson has managed to both critique the celebrity and at the same time construct an elegy to the celebrity’s lost self. I can’t help but almost believe that Johnson may be mourning that we are unable to believe in, stop for, or smell “the rose named for Me.” The Winter Me is us, all of us in our worlds of empty images and hollow virtues – we are all in the winter of self.

Johnson’s retrospective is full of such devastating moments and at times, Johnson is outright cunning in his ability to offer works that hide under a blanket of detachment then lure you in and demand that you be human. Though satire, irony, and collage are Johnson’s tools, he is ultimately uneasy with the fact that things can never be straightforward anymore. He uses the world of irony to critique irony itself. Johnson knows deeply that irony or displacement of any kind comes with a loss, that the lack of whole or the lack of center for the self shifts its nature into a thin collaged entity that is great danger of being lost entirely. As in Untitled (Jesus + I), 1990 the self can be reduced to simply the things by which the self surrounds itself, commodities pitched for old fashioned purposes now past purpose – Honey and Almond Scrub and Super Aloe Lemon cleanser to wash something that is becoming increasingly hard to know or even see.

Ultimately, the ability of Johnson to mourn and offer effective elegies may not necessarily be a victory over cynicism but definitely suggests a depth in the work that the simple label of “cynical” might miss. For instance, a true cynic probably wouldn’t care whether gay icon and tragic figure Sal Mineo came first, last, or at all in a roll call of celebrities from the cast of The Misfits or Rebel without a Cause in Untitled (Movie Stars on Clouds), 1982/84. However, Johnson insists that Mineo be present in every display and always come last. Johnson puts forth his affections for Mineo and is not ashamed to do so. Johnson’s work is full of such simple human gestures, and I would have to say that his work is less in the line with artists that simply critique design or celebrity culture and more in line with those that secretly love design and celebrity culture but wish it didn’t come with such horrible losses -- more early human Warhol, for instance, than late cynical empty Warhol.

Johnson can even exist without irony at all and can employ straightforward representation to heartbreaking effect. Christopher Knight, in his review of Johnson, is right in focusing on Johnson’s most recent work Untitled (Achievement: SW Corner, Glendale + Silverlake Blvds), 2009 as particularly telling. Johnson’s first completed work in a number of years, he renders an L.A. apartment ding-bat window and an askew Emmy award with a few slashes then photographed and framed the work. Knight’s attention to the poetry of the picture is wonderful:

“Wings held high, her body straining forward with an atom held aloft, Emmy recalls Tinker Bell, the jealous pixie who glowed brightest for Peter Pan. Johnson's trophy is precariously balanced, as if poised between a neighborhood display of self-satisfied pride and an imminent swan dive off a suicide ledge.”

However, I am more interested in the fact that this is a straightforward representation of something that Johnson saw, that the picture believes in representation enough to give the viewer credit. Johnson knows we know about celebrity and what it does -- we no longer need to be shocked out of our complacence or jarred into condemning it. No design tricks, no irony, no satire – just connected, good old fashioned human hopes and dreams, realities and fictions, placed where we can see it.

Maureen Gallace

2009-07-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

Maureen Gallace

Closed May 23, 2009

In the Summer 2009 issue of ArtReview, I invite you to read my piece on Maureen Gallace's last show at Michael Kohn Gallery. This is a link to the article online. Thanks for reading.

Scott McFarland’s Garden Photographs

2009-07-07T17:51:00.000-07:00

Scott McFarland

Regen Projects

Closed July 3, 2009

I guess that any discussion of Scott McFarland’s photography must start in a garden. McFarland is comfortable in gardens, often uses gardens as his subject matter, and the first McFarland photo I remember being interested in was of a garden, Huntington Botantical Gardens in San Marino, California . . ., 2005. The large photograph (over 13 feet in length) struck me as a kind of bowl, the vegetation seems to cradle a central element, a group of cacti ready to be placed somewhere in the fauna. There is elegance to this slight curve in the scene and it added an effect that was hard to come to terms with. Once metaphoric concerns enter the scene (namely of the constructed nature of the photograph and of maybe nature itself), the aesthetics of the scene are not voided or put the side – all of the concerns seem to work together for their end, which is a presentation about the truth of nature and photography and how that truth contributes to beauty.

I remember my initial thought, standing in front of this photo, was that everything felt wild. A few weeks later, I started to reflect on the oddity of that thought, the thought that this photograph felt wild. Reflection might substitute the word wild with words like “in process” or “being sorted.” The garden in the photograph is being sorted -- it is being taken from a state of wildness (something that we can no longer truly know) into a state of touch or into the realm of the human. The thing that you notice about the photograph is that you start to make distinctions between plants that are in the ground and flourishing and plants that are ready to be planted -- there are an assortment of plants with their roots exposed, laying on the ground, marked with yellow and red labels, still in their pots. The ground is well trodden throughout the photograph, everywhere there are indications that work is happening here, that perhaps the gardeners are on a break or at lunch. This garden, in other words, is being assembled, it is being arranged into a certain idea of a garden. This is not nature in the raw but nature positioned not only aesthetically but into a sort of existence (maybe the plants are arranged according to waterlines or existing paths, maybe the industry of the garden is more involved).

There is a second level of meaning here. The garden in the photograph is also a metaphor for how McFarland is interacting physically with the photographic process. The idea of a garden arranging something natural (plants from the natural landscape or from hot houses) into some sort of order could be thought of a direct reference to an analogue photograph (a photo that records light from nature onto a negative) being loaded onto a computer and being touched, rearranged, added to, and sorted in Photoshop. For McFarland, photography is like gardening and the photographer is a gardener – they both take givens (plants or the light received from nature by the camera) and sort them into something conceptual, aesthetic, or both. The photo taken at the Huntington (shifted and sorted by camera techniques) could easily be considered a darkroom or photoshop.

McFarland’s photographs of gardens, I think, are clever and revelatory about photography without being preachy. One thing I love about these photographs is they do not advertise their production but instead simply acknowledge it – people touch gardens and they touch photographs, no reason to get fussy or too philosophical about the matter (although I like to, from time to time). There is something about McFarland’s gardens that are fully embodied and there in a way that perhaps McFarland’s photos including people are not. In those photographs, the people are not comfortable in the photograph -- they do not feel like they belong. The lighting is often inconsistent and the seams a little too apparent. How they are made is there, both visually and metaphorically, but in the photographs of people, the disjoint between the collaged and the background seems to come at a loss to beauty. The gardens seem a visual whole, refer to how they are made, but do not sacrifice beauty for a clumsy point about constructed images.

And why should I care about any of this? To what point do I praise certain of McFarland’s photographs for planting the roots of their creation inside themselves without fanfair, without ceremony, without overt reference, and without sacrifice of aesthetics?

I would say that I find McFarland’s straightforward and humble photos of gardens more appealing than other photographers that are all obsessed with showing the effect and results of production, obsessed with revealing that making a photograph is a process bound up in a market and in ideologies, that these markets and ideologies necessarily separate us from our humanity and turn us into hollow beings. Often photography of this kind is overly earnest, didactic, and obscure. On one hand, the photographers seem distrustful that their viewers can get all the information they need to take away from their practice, while on the other, keeping them information from them by desperately wanting to avoid expression, metaphor, and other time honored tools for conveying meaning.

I will be the last to say that I like even most of McFarland’s photographs because I don’t, but these gardens do promote a way of acknowledging and expanding many of the lessons we’ve learned about photography in the last thirty years without the (supposedly necessary) emptying out of sentiment, romantic notions of beauty, humanity, and of a unified vision of the world. McFarland’s gardens do not seem to fall into these traps. His concerns are fresh and of the moment, but he does so without abandoning humanist concerns like beauty and metaphor. For McFarland, these difficult to know and perhaps old fashion realms of meaning in art are necessary and unavoidable when you want to make a point to a viewer or to show them something dazzling. It is true we are heirs to an age of critique and an age where humanist concerns were taken apart, revealed, and damaged, but that does not mean that we must take that age as a given and despair. I think McFarland’s gardens offer a nice alternative.

IcallitORANGES on Twitter

2009-06-19T15:27:00.000-07:00

Hello Everyone,

I often hear that I do not post enough on my blog, and yes, it is a failing. I am trying to work harder, but the fact is that my articles take a while for me to reflect on. I do not feel comfortable posting in rapid fire succession, and I often take weeks before deciding to write a piece and weeks more to write one. Twitter, however, is a different medium and I will start posting more quick hit thoughts on culture as I encounter them through literature, poetry, gallery and museum shows, plays, and all other things that constantly bombard my life. The call sign is @icallitORANGES. I hope to see you on there. If you follow me, I'll follow you.

Best,

Patrick Hill in Art Review

2009-06-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

Patrick Hill
Closed March 21, 2009

In the March issue of ArtReview, I invite you to read my piece on Patrick Hill's last show at David Kordansky Gallery. This is a link to the article online. Thanks for reading.

Jeni Spota

2009-06-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

Jeni Spota

Santa Monica Museum of Art

Through August 22nd

Jeni Spota plucks magisterial scenes from soups of oil paint, which in her hands, is more like primordial clay. They are usually layered religious visions, heavenly hierarchies much like you would find in a mosaic in Ravenna, in Bellini paintings, or in Giotto’s frescos. Giotto, in particular, played a large role in her last show at Sister, when she displayed a series based on Giotto’s dreams and the Arena Chapel in Padua. The paintings started with a scene from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Decameron where Giotto has a vision of what eventually became the Arena last judgment panel (still from the Decameron shown below and here is a link to the actual movie scene). Spota takes the film version, the dream version of the chapel scene, and riffs this starting point into paint, ripping and shaping hundreds of figures from an ooze of colors and formlessness.

Giotto’s painting is given its dream life in Pasolini’s set and camera, the representations on the chapel wall live and breath inside Giotto’s dream, a dream that solved not only his problem of financial existence (he was pressured to get the job done), but also gave his work a meaning beyond the commission, a meaning that came from elsewhere. In Spota’s versions, the heavenly hosts we see arranged on tiers in Pasolini and at Arena dissolve into a whirl of painterly energy -- a daub, a smudge, or a quick palette knife slash of paint is enough to render a body or the firmament itself. The paintings hold their images seemingly momentarily, tentatively threatening to disappear.

These are not ordinary religious images, neither in the past nor present. They have none of the fixity and comforting strength of altarpieces, none of the earthen value of gold. They are visions in flux and if all visions are in flux (which they may be) they even call into question Giotto who, all those many years ago, worked from one. The imagery is no mere stock footage. They seem to take more than pageantry for their subject matter. This is sticky territory and Spota seems to be mindful of the dilemma that she is in. Perhaps in response, she displays two new works as almost a corrective currently at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The first is called Don’t Tread on Me, a flag made of coats of arms and streaked paint, a clear reference to Jasper Johns’ flag. The other piece is a bronze cast of one of the religious paintings (a strategy that Johns also used with his Flag).

I was immediately skeptical of Spota’s works, despite how much their apparent skill and aesthetic impact seduced me. I was smitten with the works but wondered why, I wondered where these paintings could take me and if they hold up under the pressure of their content. Could they properly dialogue with Pasolini, an extremely complicated and misunderstood figure, a person as mired in the past as he was desperately engaged in the action of the present? To cut right to it, are Spota’s works ironic? Are they unapologetically spiritual? If they are critical, what are they critical of? Is it possible to be spiritual in the arts at the moment, when the official stance seems to be the promotion of the exact opposite? Do the works try to have it both ways, presenting a religious face while undermining it at once? If the work does exist between two competing viewpoints, is it rigorous, critical, and most importantly, is it engaged with all the subjects at level beyond caricature?

I think the place to start with these questions is Spota’s decision to cast a work in bronze and to make that reference to Johns. As objects, these works are weak at the moment (though I am optimistic about Spota being able to take things further in the future), but the idea behind this move is fascinating. It was as if it was 1954, the Castelli Gallery, and Jasper Johns’ first show all over again, a moment where fevered dreams of belief met up with raw material and the physical status of objects, where people started to wonder what one had to do with the other. You could call it the day that art lost its innocence.

Let me be more clear, imagine being at that Johns opening (let’s just assume we all know what is going on at all times) and being used to the existential planes of the Ab Ex, playing out their human dramas before us mixed with a lot of super-formalist rhetoric. Suddenly you see a simple symbol of a flag in the gallery, actually not a symbol but a constructed symbol that covers the entire canvas. You would be tempted to think (under the circumstances) that Johns is playing a joke on all representation by showing that everything is in fact a representation, that your symbols are just that, just symbols. Again, the flag is the canvas, the canvas is the flag. It is not a picture of a flag, it is somewhere between a picture and an object.

Johns, however, was not playing a mere joke. He was putting everything in crisis – enter the clearest expression of doubt in painting and art volleyed since the Duchamp’s urinal. It was a powerful moment, a sort of moment that should, when you stop laughing, put you in tears. At that moment, the questions on the table were dread coupled with even more dread – “Are you people making this stuff up?,” Johns’ was asking, then he asked an even more horrible question, "And if you are making this stuff up, why should I believe you?”

In referencing this moment (and if I am over reading into the work, I don’t really care), Spota is not just being clever but is mindful of not only the trouble with representation but also the trouble with the representation of religious images. Like the flag, Spota turns a representation into an object when she casts it in bronze, pulling out of the realm of the visual (with its ability to dream and its requirement that you believe that representation is an adequate embodiment of ideas) into the world of objects, the world where there is nothing behind the curtain but what you have put there, a world where there are no secrets. Spota does try to have it both ways – she gives us representation of a religious vision and takes it away by turning it into an object. The moment of revelation (the moment where we see what is behind things) is turned into an object without secrets. It is almost perverse to think that in the Spota work, the moment of transubstantiation is the moment when the work is most secular.

Pasolini takes a similar approach in the Decameron, a movie which presents moments of religious belief and subsequently shows their origin in the dirty world of material life. Johns and Pasolini, combined in the work of Spota, become interesting confederates. In referencing Pasolini and Johns, she is aligning herself with people deeply concerned with the line between hard material reality and the dreams that spring from it. And from this fraternity of doubters, you can finally start thinking about Spota’s paintings in a way that matters beyond materials, paint, movies, and art. There are issues presented in the work that are unspoken and reach beyond the distinction between symbol and embodied spirit, between metaphor and transubstantiation, to a place where a battle occurs about whether or not these are still valid things to think about. This is still a question in the arts, this distinction between life brimming full of essence and an existence that is determined only after life is set into motion. Galleries are not purely secular sites, but a place where valid looks into the fabric of things are still possible. The questions remain unsolved.

This is a controversial view, I know. A certain part of the artworld, those reared on second hand Marxism and critical theory, would emphatically say, "of course, galleries are secular sites – we’ve spent the last 50 years trying to void art of this spiritual mumbo jumbo and put it purely in the world, purely in a material reality from which we can try to get things done. That’s why we worry about painting that remains representational, because it still holds onto the belief that representation can do something when we know that it cannot.” Another part of the arts, perhaps, may think this a little dramatic, that the terms just mentioned are a bit silly, and casually sit back as the art “grounded in material reality” fails to inspire, fails to offer any insight into a human condition that not only lives but dreams, not only fucks and eats but also imagines and desires and creates and lives according to those dreams though they maybe a mere fantasy. Call this artworld the “uncomfortable agnostics.” There may even be, if we allow ourselves to step away for a second from our opening night parties and our dog eared copies of Adorno, a third artworld of unapologetic believers who exist though they are ridiculed, an artworld that may include more numbers than the first two combined and squared.

To think completely in the arts and to think completely about the world and the people in it is to confront all three visions of art, and I like Spota’s work because it necessarily speaks to all three and does not let anyone off the hook. Spota’s work is a dream but a horrible one in my opinion, equally capable of wild imaginings as it is of crippling doubts. The dilemma of Spota’s work plays multiple realms of belief against the others. For a careful, skeptical, and tortured believer like me, this work is troubling and allows me to call out to a quiet sky, wondering why we’ve been abandoned and whether or not that abandonment is the truth. For an outright believer, the form of these paintings might also be inspiring, forms able see visions come forth from soup and be pictured briefly before fading into nothing, like a prayer to the darkness that offers a fleeting comforting second before reality closes in. For the non-believer, Spota’s paintings must rehash the essential material questions offered by Johns and Duchamp and must be a curiously inventive way to reenter the realm of painting, an entrance based on doubt but catalyzed by the temptation of belief.

I wonder whether or not this is a new reality for us or whether or not this has always haunted humans, whether or not Spota is clever in a post-modern, art historical sort of way, or whether or not she is simply being sympathetic to a doubt and crisis that artists may have always known. Pasolini trafficked freely between high camp, just plain bad cinema (seriously, watch it again all you crazy eyed fans), and some very profound thinking on some of the deepest issues. Pasolini placed the sacred ambiguously in the realm of the profane, playing high minded spirituality in the same hand as abject human/bestial circumstances. Nothing Pasolini did ever directly canceled out the tension inside of him, he could not help but connect to his Italian past. I like that Pasolini, an atheist, sympathesized with Giotto, and I think that the questions Pasolini asked in the Decameron are eternally relevant. Spota seems right there with Pasolini and Giotto, sharing their doubts, their beliefs, and their fevered dreaming. It will be interesting to see her take this project further. It is important work.

Walead Beshty

2009-04-27T08:39:00.000-07:00

Walead Beshty: Passages

LAX Art

Through May 2, 2009

Walead Beshty’s work uses a set of constraints or conditions to determine an outcome rather than rely on using a medium for a metaphor or an allusion to something. It is actually not a very difficult concept, though the jargon surrounding Beshty’s practice is some of the heaviest since Liam Gillick. Simply put: when you step on Beshty’s shatterproof, mirrored glass in LAX Art and leave your trace and your crack, your life in the space (your movement, your steps) determines what is present in the work -- the collective impulse of the room determines the aesthetic happenstances that become the piece. The artist does not endow the piece with its life -- he sets the conditions and lets the life happen.

It is the same with his photographs or the Fed Ex boxes. For his abstractions (which we don’t see in the LAX show), Beshty’s actions in the darkroom move according to set of conditions that he has either preset or the machines make a necessity. The results are photos of folds and random colors and can be striking and lovely. For his x-ray photographs, Beshty walks film through an airport x-ray machine, exposing the film and determining partially the later outcome of the printing. Then there are the box works, where Beshty sends a cube or triangle of glass in the mail. Fed Ex handles the box as they would any other box. The glass cracks and sometimes breaks. This determined thing is subsequently displayed, a literal “handled” record of its travels around the world.

In Beshty’s work, things happen, the outcomes can even be surprising or even beautiful, but the work never escapes or fails to acknowledge the conditions which led to its creation. The camera, the darkroom, and the nature of photography are good places to enact his views of the world. After all, mechanisms, chemicals, printers, and darkrooms are all conditions that contain the action of an abstract, unknowable entity called the photographer. We see the marks of the people stepping on the glass but don’t know anything about them.

This way of working is popular and its vision is consistent with how many in the visual arts see the world. The dream of this work is to de-center the artist as the agent and arbiter of meaning of the work. Instead, the artist sets the conditions and then takes a step back, allowing the interaction between the viewer and the work to make the meaning. This apparently avoids the pitfalls of the artists injecting ideology into the work or when an artist becomes didactic, teaching some lesson to the viewer. The viewer instead comes to their own conclusions.

It doesn’t bother many that this type of work can, in fact, be very didactic, that the artist, despite the arguments to the contrary and their apparent phobia of “expressing,” can’t help but be present and directing in terms of what they want you to see. In fact, in all of the text and materials that surrounds work of this nature, the artist is in fact much more imposing a vocal force than in those brushy paintings that everybody felt were screaming at them in the fifities. The work claims an objective, distant, and a dispassionate way of handling the world (that it fully acknowledges itself as one amongst many systems), but ultimately the way of working disallows many of the things that make people essentially human, basically their ability to weigh their own thoughts against another set of clear thoughts to come up with a reasonable way of living. The reasons for this, as I will discuss, mostly lies in the work’s obscurity, its coyness about its intentions and what it is trying to do, and ultimately, it’s frigid nature -- its lack of ability to handle things that are essentially human like emotion, passion, and most of all mystery.

In other words, there are reasons why Beshty’s work makes me uncomfortable, and it is difficult for me to get involved too deeply with it. First, its political motives are unclear. Second, its system claims to be purely secular and not open to any intangibles other than chance when this is clearly not the case. Finally, the work is a closed, un-escapable system for approaching life and work that I simply don’t buy into.

First, politics: the work has vague political overtones that are not clear (leftist, maybe defeated Marxist, maybe just suburban melancholy, difficult to know) and does not (not that art really ever does) promote any action on the part of the viewer to enact any change in society though (and I am speculating here) it might want to. For instance, we find with a little bit of research that the billboard over LAXART art is a zoomed-in vision of smog particles over Los Angeles. Yes, the fact that the billboard is typically a conveyor of commerce shyly suggests that there is a connection between commerce and smog. Well, we knew that, what now? The x-ray photographs might suggest that the process of screening at an airport, the “exposure,” is intrusive into our lives and goods. We knew that too. I frankly am glad to get screened. I think more often than not it is not offensive and keeps people safe. I’m oversimplifying, but I hope you see my point: the gallery context as a setting for “critique” sets up that Beshty might have a problem with certain aspects of society, but it is difficult to arrive at an understanding of what those problems are and what we or Beshty might do about them.

I think this is confirmed by the photographs of abandoned malls and empty stores, those failed businesses marooned without a purpose, clicking on a screen in a slide show with the soundtrack of Dawn of the Dead playing in the background. These are probably meant, in some way, as Becher or Stephen Shore photographs for our generation (the connection is actually so close that I would argue that it limits the relevance of Beshty’s photos). Again, there is with these photographs an implied problem, an implied dread about the state of society. Are these malls and business a look at the post-apocalypse or a subtle warning about capitalism as Beshty himself has suggested about Shore’s photographs and which Beshty writes about often? Are these the empty spaces that the zombies have left? Are consumers in general just zombies? We don’t know and are left wading through Beshty’s writings and going to panel discussions and talks to get the answers. We cannot find any answers in the work.

For me, it does not do much good to attempt to answer these questions. To assume that consumers are trapped in systems of production and are products themselves and the subsequent dread attached to those thoughts is familiar, well trodden, and I would say overly simplified if not outright silly. A more probable thought, in my mind at least, is to not assume the world is ending like some secular sibyl but to assume instead that those abandoned building will be re-appropriated, will be used again. For what? Well, that would be something to think about. I guess what I am saying is that I don’t quite understand what Beshty wants from presenting this data to us. What does he want to happen? Beshty’s art diagnoses a shifty illness that we do not quite understand and therefore for which we cannot write a prescription.

Another reason I am uncomfortable is that Beshty’s work aims to be completely and utterly secular when it cannot succeed at it. Beshty makes it a point to say that his work does not involve things like gesture, expression, subjecthood, intention, representation, or any other idea associated with a “transcendental” vision of art. I do not think this is the whole story. Like I mentioned in the previous paragraphs, there is a bit of expression going on, albeit obliquely -- there is direction going on in the work. We need stories -- we need to know about how the work is made. We need to know about Beshty’s accident with an x-ray machine which exposed his photographs of an Iraqi embassy, we need to know that Beshty is setting conditions, that we are inside those conditions. We don’t know Beshty, but he is in there somewhere expressing, that’s for sure, and that expression is necessary to arrive at an understanding of the work. Why else would we suspect the work might be involved with something political? In a political realm, there are viewpoints. Beshty has one, even if it is not very clear. There is intention. Can’t escape it.

Finally and most importantly, Beshty’s vision of how art functions does not promote a vision of human life that I understand. Namely it supposes that all human interactions are governed by sets of conditions that can be shifted and negotiated but never overcome. Silly things like beauty, passion, and aesthetics are just bi-products of the system that contains them. “Be transparent about the system, be skeptical about those bi-products, and keep your distance,” the work seems to be saying. Beshty might get such a vision of experience from a variety of sources and it is not important whether they are Marxist or Post-structuralist or both. The fact is that the vision seems rather closed.

Sure, there are beautiful aesthetic moments in the work but there is no framework to deal with such topics other than, “you see, this is what happens when humans interact with things.” I compare this vision to the vision of Wallace Stevens, who took comfort in things and processes because he just could not believe that anything outside of direct experience offers any sort of guarantee for that experience. That’s true, you might say, and that is your right. I, for one, prefer, “Well, you never know, maybe there is something we cannot see, that cannot be determined, maybe things are a bit more complicated.” I like art that accounts for such mysteries and avoid work that discounts them in favor of mechanisms, conditions, and little, as they say, “sites of resistance.”

Raymond Pettibon in ArtReview

2009-04-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

Raymond Pettibon: Part II: Cutting-Room Floor Show
Regen Projects
Closed January 29, 2009

In the March issue of ArtReview, I invite you to read my piece on Raymond Pettibon's last show at Regen Projects. This is a link to the article online. Thanks for reading.

Lester Monzon

2009-03-31T15:41:00.000-07:00

Lester Monzon: Do Not Alter

Kinkead Contempoary

Show closed in February

Let’s look at what Lester Monzon does – he paints a found surface, culled from recognizable design patterns ranging from abstract paintings to tee-shirts to tabletops, and then articulately brushes and stains on top of the surface, sometimes accumulating a great number of marks (dense color packed brushstokes falling like leaves, piles, or puddles) and sometimes leaving his physical trace (as in a fingerprint) on the surface like a smear, smudge, or stain (think of Jasper Johns setting his paint can on his canvas, leaving a ring in the paint). Monzon makes marks on top of a programmatic surface. Sounds simple enough.

Or maybe not so simple. I admit that the more I looked at Monzon’s work, the deeper the small works became. The paintings exist in an interesting place, in a fertile zone nourished by both the last thirty years of abstract painting as well as by some of most essential questions about how and what we see, how what we see is determined on how we see and what we believe we are seeing. For me and how I see the world, the paintings are split between the cynicism and critique of recent art history (sometimes a game of artworld insider wittisms which threatens to shut most of the human race out of contemporary art entirely) and what is really may be really at stake in the arts, the willingness to see the human as expressive, meaningful creatures. They are smart and tricky works.

The first thing to notice in Monzon’s work is that visual design (which I will call form, order, or a plan) is equivalent wherever it is found. To Monzon, design is simply a surface. For instance, Bridget Riley’s op art designs have the visual equivalency of a Venice Beach blacklight poster. The design is the background over which Monzon does more lyrical activities like brush strokes and random streams of paint. The interplay between the surface and what apparently on top or concurrent with the surface is what creates something interesting for me. It is not as easy as it sounds, let me explain.

The question is whether or not these lyrical activities are somehow different from the background design. Does a so-called “human mark” have any more purchase in a painting than a programmed or machined one? Are not Monzon’s human marks still made with a brush, just like the surfaces of his found designs? Is Monzon expressing himself in spite of rules and order (humanity atop rigorous design) or can we just say that everything on Monzon’s surfaces is equivalent, that all is surface, that all the colors and shapes fall in the so called trap of representation where there is nothing really human but there is instead just a performance inside of a system that does not allow true humanity or any further thoughts on what it means to be one. Maybe that is all being a human is, fooling yourself into thinking that you are unique or expressive (you find this latter belief in the paintings of Sarah Morris for example where design is all encompassing and, though intuitively arrived at, is pervasive and overbearing).

Monzon is definitely not the first to toy with fact that human marks and designed surfaces have few visual differences. This is a major question in painting extending from Picasso, through Johns, and into the painting of today (to some, it is the question that killed painting for good). Think of Picasso’s ripping of Seurat’s pointalism out of optic theory and placing it as a pattern on an armchair, think of Lichtenstein transforming each “style” from German Expressionism to Cubism into his system of painted Ben-day dots, think of Warhol’s comparison of a Rorschach drawing to the flowing fields of Morris Louis and Taaffe using snakes from field guides to mimic Pollock’s paint skeins.

Monzon, as well as each artist mentioned, plays on an anxiety found at the heart of painting. If a painting looks like wallpaper, where does it derive its value? If two things look exactly the same, then where does the meaning come from? Is it just pretension that separates one from the other? This was particularly troubling to modernists, people like Kandinsky who believed that to leave content out of painting and to pursue pure form was to leave the physical world entirely or like the critic Clement Greenberg, who thought painting’s internal logic and the manifestation of that logic in history literally gave painting a guarantee and purpose. In a world where painting rolled a hard six on its value (literally staking the physical and spiritual world), to compare a Rothko to Grandma’s bathroom floral print was tricky and anxiety inducing experience. The artists mentioned above were willing to take on that anxiety to see where it went – they were willing to be funny, ironic, cynical, or even mean spirited. They deflated so called “high mindedness” in favor of what maybe the harsher truth -- that human expression through painting maybe impossible or merely self-indulgent and therefore useless to the wider world. These painters get both catty and gossipy in their work, but, and this is more important, they also get at the big issues of what art is, what it should do.

Monzon’s work initially bothered me because it seemed to be running too closely with Lichtenstein, Taaffe, and the many other artists in the lineage of raising questions about painting. Was Monzon’s painting just another game in an ongoing series of artworld games or this there something more there (for me, there has to be something more or that which I am looking at is thin)?

With Monzon, I literally faced an fork in the road -- some of Monzon’s brush strokes want to be the mere representations of brushstrokes like Lichtenstein’s but other brush stokes call out for a deeper lyricism, something beyond the dated battles between the high and the low, abstraction of conviction and vapid design, the clerics and the philistines. Literally, Monzon’s strokes, for me, flicker on his surfaces somewhere between the self-congratulatory feeling of being on the inside of an inside joke and the feeling of sitting on a cold modernist patio and then being unexpectedly charmed by a piece of graffiti or a leaf falling, the feeling that something important is happening. Both views are important and both make you better in someway, but the second has the potential to produce joy and aesthetic meaning, meaning that is both intellectual and sensual – the good stuff.

For this reason, I think Monzon’s work exists in a cozy but vital space which has conviction and importance. To me, much contemporary painting (and art in general for that matter) is torn between a belief in design (wouldn’t it be great to have the power to aesthetically arrange someone’s life with the objects that we love so much to make them a better person, wouldn’t it be great to make the ultimate painting) and the horror of design being totalizing (that a human being could really be just a matter of design). This is an absolute rat’s nest if you think about it – we need to believe in design as somehow helpful to give conviction to what we do but if design is totalizing, something dies. Monzon’s work seems to exist somewhere between the two, his brushstrokes and designs threatening (at the same time) to both ennoble and debase the design it finds itself involved with. These are genuine surfaces where things are not simple, where things are not set for sure – they may look familiar but I recommend spending some time with these works. They will surprise you.

Elger Esser and Nature’s Second Virginity

2009-03-10T15:03:00.000-07:00

Elger Esser
Rose Gallery
Show closed in February

Depending on your poetic temperament, Elger Esser’s photographs might be hard to believe in. He finds stillness and beauty in the most unlikely places – an abandoned barge, a polluted canal, a field of wrecked cars, a burnt out or decomposing dock. The light is soft and milky, often a pale scrim of green which showers the world in an ethereal fog. Esser often focuses on ruins or on remnants of things past and the result is something that feels other worldly but isn’t, seems manipulated by the photographic process but is actually a scene that Esser labored to find.

I like how Eric Gero, studio manager of Lapis Press and recent project manager and assistant to Esser, put it when he said, “these are places where humans have been.” What I find important in Gero’s statement is that though humans have touched the nature presented, Esser still finds resonance in the scene, not by being cynical about human presence but by believing that we can still see things for the first time. Nature and light pervades back into the scene and over the remnants of humanity. This pervasion of nature into and through culture is then something new, something seen for the first time -- even though we’ve been there, we need not fabricate something to be surprised. The real, the givens behind things, can emerge and be seen.

Ponte A Tressa II (2002), for example, shows a series of flowing hills, populated by (not punctuated by) stripped cars and power lines. The scene is not beautiful, I would argue, despite these cars and power lines but beautiful with these elements. The viewer finds the beauty (that instant aesthetic desire to know the object) all at once. The same happens in the brilliant Cutting Warf 1, 2008, and again it is power lines that record the human touch on landscape. Esser again does not draw attention to the touch (perhaps as some people do to condemn it) but shows the touch now naturally as part of the scene. This is not eternal nature but nature that has evolved into culture and is now different. Just because we can’t go back to untouched nature, that does not make our new reality any less desirable or beautiful. Esser is neither a poet of authenticity (Wordsworth wanting to return to nature before humans) nor an environment poet (Like Robert Haas who condemns man’s destruction of nature). Maybe, we will call him a poet of co-existence.

These are not apocalyptic images. Though strange in appearance, Esser is not projecting an idea of a future but instead he is finding the present. Esser’s are not photographs of spectacle, they are photographs that acknowledge that though we can be melodramatic about our technology and our lot, that silence and stillness and a centered vision of reality still exists, still fills up around us, and invite us to dwell. We can’t go back to the ancient times, we are not innocent, but neither are we lost to the silence that has been there all along. Esser seems to believe in a sort of second virginity for nature, virginity found by belief rather than granted by an essence. These are wise photographs.

This vision, it seems to me, comes from Esser’s unique interpretation of the project of Bernd and Hilla Becher, those late typographies where the Bechers, through a straightforward presentation of industrial buildings (by just comparing them) observed poetry and meaning filling the scene, that the act of looking and making meaning can never be separated, ever. Like the Bechers, Esser depends on the documentary nature of the photographic process (light from nature onto paper) but knows that the fundamental truth of the photographic index (the imprint or trace of reality) can hardly contain everything, meaning comes in from all sides and informs the image, adds to the image. Again like the Bechers, Esser believes in reality and that reality provides its own wonders.

This is a far cry from Andreas Gursky, who constructs his photographs from dozens of base images in photoshop. Whereas with Esser, we get the weirdness first (we can’t believe that what he is seeing was actually how that moment in time was for his camera), Gursky’s photographs initially strike a viewer as impressive but real. With Esser, we slowly come to understand that the photographer is not trying to trick us, that he is showing us a moment as he sees it, a moment that is bound in the photograph. With Gursky, it is only after careful viewing do we realize that something is amiss, that a cow has been repeated several times, that the ceiling and rows of products in the store are arranged and resorted, that the lighting is theatrical. With Gursky and his constructed reality, the understanding of the image as constructed and inauthentic comes later.

So who do we believe here, Gursky or Esser? Who is more conducive to our present moment? I consider this to be a very important question on many fronts, maybe even concerning the biggest questions of our time. If I go with Gursky, I acknowledge that part of us that assembles from the fragments of our senses and makes reality up as it goes along. If I go with Esser, I depend on that part of us that believes that though we add to nature, that nature still has a certain reality behind it.

To try and answer this question, I will start with a theory that I heard presented by Matthew Biro of the University of Michigan in the recent CAA conference, basically that Gursky’s presentation of images is more real, a closer metaphor to our reality that the indexical beliefs of the Bechers. I guess that one could extend the argument to Esser.

Biro reasoned that Gursky’s constructed images are closer to our reality because Gursky’s process (assembling appearances from separate sources) is a metaphor for how we regard ourselves these days, as an accumulation of images, as construction of surfaces that can be rearranged at will. This is the Oscar Wilde view of the self -- as our representations shift, so does our reality, that our only reality is our representations. This self has no center, form is separate from function, our world is a world of translations and shifting.

Again, as we’ve seen time and again on this blog, this is the status quo vision of the self offered by the present art theories, the vogue theories that fill Artforum and the like. In other words, the self apparently once was thought of to have a center and had images which corresponded to that understanding and now we apparently have a new understanding of self and also have images to match – this is how Gursky, according to people like Biro, can be more of the moment than the Bechers and Esser.

But to give all of reality to the flow of images and the rearrangement of images seems tyrannical to me, this giving over everything we are to what we have made for ourselves, our interpretations of nature and self. In my view, the need of this theory to overcome limiting positivism (the idea that we can rationally interpret the function and will of nature) leaves us fundamentally alienated from the fact that there are givens, that there is reality not shaped by us but found by us, that prevails upon us rather than the other way around.

So ultimately, I side with Esser because he acknowledges our impact on things and that our representations of things shape how we see things. However (and this is a big however) the reality is still there, it still emerges (especially when we forget about it or get melodramatic about it). I love that in this world where constructed images reign (at the moment I hope rather than forever) that someone like Esser can show us the dazzling font of reality mixed with human vision. I like this photography of co-existence. I like its prospect, I like that the real is now emerging as something forgotten, something buried, something uncanny. I like that reality can still surprise us.

Tim Berresheim

2009-02-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

Tim Berresheim
Patrick Painter Gallery
Through February 28th

Tim Berresheim works in Cologne, lives in the world of Sigmar Polke, and makes work that reminds me of not only of Polke but also Berresheim’s teacher Albert Oehlen. Also in the work are the strange flavors of the most unusual Americans around, Mike Kelley and Lucas Samaras. Like all of those artists, Berresheim does not hold onto any one medium too closely – for instance in his current Patrick Painter show, he divides his spaces between theatrical, creepy photographic productions and clean cut, properly printed (sort of like a silkscreen but not quite) wood panels. Also like those artists, Berresheim is savvy and talented enough to use all of his mediums well. The result is the work of a bit of a split personality, but a split personality that I’d like to get to know.

In Patrick Painter’s main space, Berresheim presents a group of beautiful, subtle surfaces of either white on white or white on black. Berresheim starts with a photograph, abstracting various structures and constellations, almost expressionist in their passages mixed with curious turns and flips. Perhaps it is Berresheim’s method of letting a machine print these images onto wood panels, but ultimately, the works are not existential or full of too much heavy breathing. Instead, Berresheim trades excessive lyricism in for slick mechanics and perfect surfaces. These images are “barely there” and are dazzling in how mute they are, you have to get in close to notice any image at all at times. If the images were painted, you would immediately think Terry Winters, late Jackson Pollock, or early Oehlen (when he silkscreened computer based drawings), but Berresheim’s use of machinery morphs these planes into something else, hybrid objects that are both unapologetically aesthetic but reticent to be too expressive.

In the Editions location, there’s Berresheim’s other body of work, photographs of interiors, gaudy dioramas with a sort of phallic vase making a repeat appearance along with bowling balls, ficus trees, chain link fence, and hair. These works feel much more derivative than then the prints on wood -- they feel like any number of Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, or most explicitly Lucas Samaras moments of full blown dementia in shocked colors. However, they are exquisitely executed and beam with an understated, mad energy. Again, expression is downplayed. The interiors are empty. Things seem to hide in them.

So, how are we to talk about Berresheim’s diverse work? How is it to be understood? I, for one, feel a little disappointed in the title of his exhibition, Condition Tidiness: Rude, in that it indulges a rampant artworld mistake of simply stating paradox and then quickly being satisfied with paradox as a condition. I don’t think it is the paradox of Berresheim that makes him interesting. Instead I think it is his approach to his work, his energy, his use of a reading of Sigmar Polke that makes him different from many of his contemporaries.

Polke is important to this work, and I hope the reader will indulge me while I tell a story. Seeing the work of Polke for the first time was for me a completely jarring, downright un-American experience. His use of silkscreens and popular imagery did not produce slick pop objects with clean logos and lines like Andy Warhol or James Rosenquist. Polke’s use of color was flagrant, overbearing, and full of a rampant spirit that felt a little mad to me, those German pools of browns and blacks, yellowing and muddy. Americans like their energy at 10 o’clock and on television. Polke is late night and in the dirt.

Polke mixes and matches the wildest things -- gestural painting with collage, slick images with sticky surfaces of linseed, handmade objects with machinery. He’s unpredictable -- when I thought I had Polke pinned, I encountered his lush landscapes, his skies of dappled color. Beauty. It was there all along, and Polke wasn’t afraid of it. I find Polke at the heart of a world that I still struggle to understand, the spiritual and earthy store of German art, a zany place that produces some of the best artwork in the world.

In Berresheim, I found it helpful to think of the breadth and openness of Polke’s practice, not its deconstruction of painting or its critique of American pop. The deconstruction stuff is too sober, too geeky. Instead, I would argue that in Berresheim, we have a shape shifter, a material hound, an escape artist. There is personality to the work yet Berresheim foregoes the posturing and personality cult angle of someone like Jonathon Meese. There is rationality to the work yet at no time is it uninteresting or overbearing. Finally, there is that strange, Samaras-like creepiness.

In this work, we have the ambition of Polke to keep things open and loose, the courage to risk beauty, yet the weirdness to avoid producing it like a factory. It is still way too early in his career to know if Berresheim can sustain this comparison to Polke, but his Patrick Painter show left me optimistic and dazzled.

Anne Collier

2009-01-21T11:24:00.000-08:00

Anne Collier
Marc Foxx Gallery
Closed December 20th

Anne Collier’s photographs put me in crisis and I’ve boiled my dilemma down to this – representational photos, in their repetition and display, often alienate a viewer from their content, and while so many important photographers working today seek to resist that unfortunate effect, Collier almost seems to promote it, to present that alienating effect in full jaded negativity. Collier seems to take us to the cynical terminus of photography -- the machine and the gallery draining the life from things, placing us at a distance from things. For me, that is a crisis.

Let me explain myself further. Consider the case of Collier’s photo Sylvia Plath, 2008. Basically, an old record collection of what has to be a Plath poetry reading sits on the floor of a gallery. There is a landscape on the cover of the box, a landscape that is mirrored by the grey gallery floor and the shocked white of the gallery walls. The collection is dwarfed by the space and placed at a distance. The actual content of Plath’s tortured, vibrant poetry is far away from the photograph. We could say that the photograph itself keeps us from it.

We could consider more cases. There’s the photograph of a photograph of a beautiful view out of a window in Studio Window, 2008. We are thoroughly removed from that lovely window -- the window holds little reality for us. The reality is instead that the mechanical, cold image does its work and its work is troubling. Furthermore, the installation of the photograph in a gallery brings a double alienating effect, one more removal. Then there is Guilt (p. 107), 2008, where Collier has photographed what is probably one of many, many pages where we can write what we are guilty of – the horror of those brackets “(p.107)” – we are trapped in the mechanical image, we are trapped in ourselves, humanity is distant. The most sobering of all of Collier’s photos are her eye photos, where the human eye is surrounded by a white border and placed on a pile of photos in a box of photo paper. What is implied is that each eye in the lens is like every other eye in every other lens and this can be repeated into infinity.

So basically, the potential emotional impact of silly sentimental things like landscapes, poetry, human progress, and human vision are drained by the photographic process. The photos we see are empty of everything but the various chains of reproduction (photograph, gallery, display) that void their gushing. To some, I am sure this is a wonderful thing – we can see these sentimental things for what they are, that they are just wailing and grinding of teeth ground to halt by technology. To some, that is an important lesson.

I, however, need something more than the lesson. I need to have the humanity somehow be let back in the process. You don’t have to like Sylvia Plath. In fact, she can be too much, way too much. She’s a tortured, bad lover. She’s out of control and messy. Sometimes, it’s just awful to read her. But the fact is (and this is what bothers me about the photograph discussed above), we must deal with Sylvia. We must make for damn sure that she continues to live and not avoid her. Hers is a heat that is too hot to touch, but definitely something that will keep you warm if you let it. Ted Hughes (and Plath’s lover) said it best when writing to Poet Donald Hall about her, “When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons to their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises.”

I found myself thinking about Hughes’ comment when viewing Collier’s photographs. Certainly, it is true that photos can alienate us from life and that is an important truth worth knowing. I am not arguing with Collier’s theory or even her display style – these are perfect prints, immaculately displayed. What instead I am worried about it that to just let the photograph do its work without any (maybe foolish) ambition to stop it, well, maybe this is a case of arguing ourselves out of our bruises. The photos make Plath, Guilt, Self-Help Books, and sublime vistas die before us in the gallery in a quest for some sort of truth about media. Maybe the hope is that in their death, they are reborn and appreciated in our minds, but this does not seem to be case for Collier.

This does seem to be the case for Thomas Ruff, the German photographer who mechanically blurs the sensational and blows up wide and big the banal. His portraits are as ordinary as they come except that they are so large. His architectural photographs show the most boring of exteriors. In his nudes and jpegs, he takes things like pornography and war photography and either blurs them into being barely recognizable or zooms in on them until they are just a haze of pixels. Here is a case of the photograph doing what it does, its natural ability to zoom in and out, to crop, to interpret, but Ruff seems to overcome the alienating effect. We think about sensationalism and what it means, we are drawn into the ordinary, but we are not allowed to be complacent, we are not allowed to be alienated.

Maybe I am just a silly optimist, but I think resisting the alienating effect is absolutely essential in art. I hate to be critical of Collier, and perhaps someone can show how I’ve misread the work and that these are actually quite human and heartening photographs that use media to let us back into our lives. Until then, however, I have to go with what I’ve written above.

Thoughts on a Year of Art

2008-12-22T11:02:00.000-08:00

Before I begin my top ten, I want to say that 2008, for me, will always be the year Robert Rauschenberg died. We lost someone special. Rest in Peace.

1. Louise Bourgeois, The Guggenheim and MOCA: Her forms seemed to grow on the Guggenheim’s Modernist, reasoned interiors. Razors and flesh, trauma and tumbling bursts of creative energy, I became a Bourgeois convert instantly. I admit I want to write about every single cell she’s done.

2. Francis Alys’ Fabiola at LACMA: Archive projects are usually awful – aesthetically mute, didactic, and boring. This exhibition proved that that does not have to be the case. Human, smart, and full of wonder, it was basically everything I need from art.

3. Sterling Ruby at MOCA, PDC: I cannot help but think that nothing less than everything is stake in Ruby’s work – who we are, where we are going, and how, most importantly, we view ourselves. The work drips with experiences so protean and raw that it scared me. That, to me, means it’s working.

4. Miles Coolidge. Acme Gallery: Coolidge simply turned furniture on its side and photographed it as if it was right side up, leaving the world askew. Such a simple inversion, but I legitimately started to think about I how align myself in the world, how the familiar determines how I see.

5. Diane Landry, Solway Jones (Old Location): Not many saw this show, but I can think of no other moment this year in art that was as charming, kinectic umbrellas opening and closing casting a patchwork of shadow and color. The tiny machines played a sad melody as accompaniment.

6. Michael Muller, Chung King Project: Muller seems as at ease thinking about the New York School of painting as he is with Tibetan meditation. Such an elegant, quiet show, one drawing of a night sky took him four months to complete.

7. Max Jansons, Christopher Grimes: I am a sucker for the well executed small painting. I am bewitched by Tomma Abts, Jeni Spota, and Maureen Gallace. I may like Jansons the best of the bunch – they feel old and crusty on the surface but have a devilish wit to them, as if Morandi gave up his life long project to flirt with pop.

8. Oranges and Sardines, The Hammer Museum: The humble return of inspiration, the show had wonderful examples of great painting by great painters as well as enough idiosyncrasies to keep you wondering about the choices that were made.

9. Alexandra Grant, Honor Fraser: Grant works primarily in a metaphoric fashion, using certain systems of color, architectural formations, and patterns to begin her paintings but she intuitively adjusts the systems in order to creating a disjoint between seeing and perceiving, short circuiting her depicted words to a certain extent.

10. Cathy Opie, Regen Projects: Not many gave Opie’s high school football photographs the credit they deserve. To me, they were accurate and heartening portrayals of boys becoming men inside a theater that will become their lives.

Other great moments (not quite on the list but memorable nonetheless) were: Diana Thater at 1301 PE, Vishal Jugdeo and Kori Newkirk at LAX, Drew Dominick and Lisa Tchakmakian at Sandroni Rey, and the group show No Room at Christopher Grimes.

Wolfgang Tillmans

2008-12-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

Wolfgang Tillmans

Regen Projects

Through December 6th

(Disclaimer -- though I encourage a visit to Tillmans' current show at Regen, this article is an essay and not a review of the show)

Holly Myers recently wrote an interesting comment on the work of Wolfgang Tillmans in the L.A. Times. She said, “Central to Tillmans’ career has been an extended flirtation with banality, pursued not merely for its own sake, in a spirit of slacker irony, but with the deep, philosophical conviction that no aspect of the social, physical or political world is devoid of meaning or unworthy of investigation. If individual images occasionally fall flat out of context . . . it needn’t detract from virtue of the pursuit and the value of such a holisitic perspective.” In other words, as the title of Tillmans’ Tate catalogue says, “if one thing matters, everything matters.”

Tillmans’ photos certainly try to live up to this non-hierarchical vision of the world – they are marked by the inclusion of everything from clouds to clubs, rubbish in the road to concords in the sky. Tillmans’ practice is inclusive as well, a composite of pretty much every approach to photography. He’s a journalist, tracking culture from the fringe to politics to parties. He’s a conceptualist, adjusting the size and shape of his photos and manipulating how they are hung for conceptual purposes. He’s what I would call a concrete photographer, one who physically manipulates the digital and traditional printing process to produce strange effects and abstractions. He’s a portraitist. He’s a naturalist. He’s a fashion photographer. In fact, the only type of photographer to which I cannot associate Tillmans is what I’d call the sound stage or staged photographer. Tillmans lives, decidedly, in the world of the snapshot.

But, I’d say, we shouldn’t be duped into actually believing that Tillmans’ vision is completely non-hierarchical and holistic –the idea that we can use the banal or ordinary to level the world, that in fact, everything is worthy of investigation. Representation (our images of stuff in the world) always brings forth an ethic and it is impossible for representation to be completely non-hierachical and holistic. Photography is always philosophical – it, by its nature as a mechanical device that deals with the world, divides and parcels the world. No matter how much it is negotiated through techniques and twists and turns (even if you take the film out of the camera, soak it in whiskey, and then expose it to paper), photography takes a stand on things – there is a choice about what will be represented (even if the choice is to try to represent nothing). You cannot be everything at once, photography is making choices to the exclusion of other choices. Tillmans does not believe that everything is worthy of investigation – if he did, he would try to be all things to all people. This is obviously not the case.

Let’s look at Tillmans. His work is full of all sorts of moral choices. For instance when he takes a celebrity portrait, he makes a point to strip away the poses that generally mark how we view celebrities. He decidedly wants the portraits to look as ordinary as possible, as if Kate Moss is just a next door neighbor in a depressed but vibrant part of hipster Berlin. Tillmans also tries his best to avoid any sentimentalized views of landscape – we see dirty snow, offhand airplane window or cockpit views of clouds, sometimes a landscape is distorted or manipulated during the printing process to leave abstract shards or dots of light on the surface. Furthermore, he likes aesthetic moments of happenstance – the folds of dirty clothes, half eaten food, random configurations on window sills.

Tillmans is clearly a political activist, likes leftist causes, and laments the state of things in German society – I think of his poignant anti-homeless device, 2000. He likes sexual liberation, equality of gender and sexual orientation, and party culture whether one finds it in apartments, in clubs, or on the lawn of a park. He thinks that war (at all times) is senseless and serves no purpose other than death.

All of these things that Tillmans does aligns his vision against all the other possible visions one could take when approaching the world and photography. His way of doing things is not holistic -- it is to the exclusion of all the other ways you can do things. Now if he placed a fully sentimentalized view of suburban bliss with an American flag on the lawn (and actually believed in the virtue of such a photograph) next to his photograph from the underside of someone’s genitals, well, that might be a little more inclusive, but Tillmans is Tillmans.

I guess what I am trying to say is that to say that the worth of Tillmans’ practice as photographer lies in the virtues of “the pursuit and the value” of a “holisitic perspective” does not tell us much about Tillmans. In fact it may detract from the fact that Tillmans decidedly does have a highly edited, specific, and even limited way of doing things – at least conceptually, we can figure him out.

Tillmans is many things, but each of his many things can be thought about and accessed. For instance, I would say that Tillmans' photographs are not particularly good examples of any one of the formal strategies that he employs. In terms of politics, he’s not Han Haacke and can actually be slightly annoying with his fussy display cases and Tony Blairs in rumpled socks. On the fringe, he’s neither Nan Goldin nor Cathy Opie and can be sentimental to a fault. For conceptualism, Jeff Wall and the Bechers seem to set the standard. I often struggle to find a purpose for Tillmans’ conceptual interventions – there’s often no clear reason why he makes certain decisions. For portraits, I go Nadar or to Thomas Struth’s families. Naturalism – well, Timothy O’Sullivan. For concrete photography, Jim Welling. And fashion? I won’t go there, I can’t go there, I have no idea.

However, I can honestly say that no living photographer has taken as many photographs that I can remember instantly as Wolfgang Tillmans. There is a set of them literally burned onto my retina. Each of these unexplainable gems are all vastly different from each other -- different subjects, different people, and there is no particular good reason why any or all of them should stick with me. In other words, I can and cannot explain Tillmans. He seems to be less and more than the sum of his parts.

The Bell from 2002 was the first photograph by Tillmans to do it. At first, I did not recognize what the image was because I was disoriented from having seen photos both shot in the starkest realism and complete abstraction while walking through his MCA Chicago retrospective. The Bell started out abstract, a few brilliant blurred color bursts on wet metal, a set of Christmas lights maybe. Then, I slowly came to find out that this was a trough style men’s urinal, the wet is presumably urine, and the burst of color, urinal scented cakes. What dazzled me about this moment was that the moment continued to dazzle. I am usually squeamish when it comes to things like this, but Tillmans didn’t offend me – it was beautiful.

Then there’s Kate with Broccoli, 1996. Yes, it is Kate Moss, but remarkably Kate Moss. Before encountering this photograph, I had this theory that of all contemporary people, we probably know the body of Moss the best – every square inch has been photographed over and over and not just by forgettable Fashion mag folk but artists, really good artists. Every pube, every pore, every toe – it is really outlandish if you think about it. Tillmans, in his photo, did not try to make her look shabby or unusual. Instead he made an art composition out of her, combining Matisse’s Red Room with a casual look you might find in a snapshot of your own family. And then the broccoli? Where did it come from? How did he ever think of it? She might has well be holding a brain – what a cannon shot!

Okay, one more. Gillian and Christopher on floor, 1993. Slightly off tilt, it is a play fight between what have to be two lovers. I love how Gillian’s legs and back form two diagonals that counter the downward thrust of Christopher centered black mass. I love how Gillian’s arm roughly matches the little strip of molding in the background. The rigor of the formalist composition is lightened by the subject matter and by the fact that Gillian is topless – simply topless, not in an overt way but topless as though it was her natural state. This is such a fun and completely erotic image – it’s also a clear affirmation of the good stuff of life.

I’ve named just three. Others include Paul, New York, 1994, Window, New Inn Yard, 1997, Untitled (La Gomera), 1997, Lutz & Alex looking at crotch, 1991, and White Jeans on White, 1991. There are so many great Tillmans photographs, but I should also say that there are ten times as many photographs by Tillmans that I will never remember, that mean nothing to me, and I would consider, at the end of study, to just not be very good. The ones that are good, however, are very good indeed -- in a non-holistic, specific sort of way.

Steve Roden in ArtReview

2008-11-20T14:17:00.000-08:00

Steve Roden
Susanne Vielmetter Gallery
Closed August 2, 2008

In the October issue of ArtReview, I invite you to read my piece on Steve Roden's last show at Susanne Vielmetter. This is a link to the article online. Thanks for reading.

Oranges and Sardines

2008-11-11T15:58:00.000-08:00

Oranges and Sardines

Hammer Museum

Through February 8, 2009

We don’t discuss inspiration openly anymore. Inspiration is much like the word “beauty.” We use it among ourselves, in the studio, and most have an inherent sense of what it means, but we don’t discuss it – you won’t find an Artforum piece on inspiration, you won’t see a symposium on inspiration. I admit thinking about inspiration is at times difficult for me. For instance, I remember studying Brice Marden in depth, with all the commentary about modernism, surface, and the painting support only to go to Marden’s artist lecture to hear “The Olives!! How wonderful they were, as I looked on them that day in Greece.”

Well, that’s fine. I am sure the olives were wonderful. However, the tension I had inside me during that particular artist lecture was that the olive comment explained everything and nothing. On one hand, it suggests the inherent mystery that makes art fascinating, the chains of meaning that lead an artist into unexpected territory. On the other hand, the olive comment seemed a bit of a cop-out, a dodge – “Back off, man, I’m an artist.”

The same tension inhabits Oranges and Sardines, Gary Garrell’s latest curatorial knockout at the Hammer, a show in which I had great interest – the poem where the show gets its title (Why I am not a Painter by Frank O’Hara) is the same source for the title of this blog. The show is so packed with great painting I could barely stand it, but the mystery at the show’s heart, that place from which art springs, is where the show moves past a casual musing into something breathtaking, a reassertion of inspiration and studio shop talk as a legitimate way of thinking about art.

Garrell’s show acknowledges that this territory remains complicated. We know, for instance, that Christopher Wool and Albert Oehlen are good friends, show with the same galleries, and have impacted each other’s work so it should be field day to have Wool himself choose his favorite Oehlen and put the work next to his own. But in pouring over these wonderful canvases, what do we really find out? We’ve enjoyed the odd abstractions of Mary Heilmann and it is wonderful to find her work next to other strange eccentric art works by Bacon, Nauman, and Beuys, but what do we discover? Mark Grotjahn has put forth a statement on modernist painting over the years that we suspected came from a cadre of great artists – how fun it is to find him choosing Reinhardt, Kusama, Albers, McLaughlin, and Mondrian. Well, that makes sense, we say, but where is the meat? What can be said other than that makes sense?

I guess it is the details that matter, how Wool and Oehlen make similar use of depth and gestural marks, how a little Hockney pool splash talks to a Heilmann’s paint drip, how Amy Sillman’s apparently random choice of Forrest Bess doesn’t seem that out of place when thinking about Sillman’s work, uncritical weird mysticism and all. Charline Von Heyl, known for slashing color and vivid bursts of energy, likes things moody and dark. Who knew? Grotjahn’s irreverence comes across not in a dramatic way, but merely through how he places his signature on a work – seeing the gaudy yellow signature next to the canvases of Albers and Reinhardt is like hearing catty laughter in a monastery.

Oranges and Sardines is full of these small pleasures, little associations that take you places, much like O’Hara’s orange took him where he didn’t think he would go. But the show is also about doubt, about how shaky being an artist can be, how hard for an artist to justify their decisions in rational language or easy diagrams.

However, the subject of the show is what I found ultimately the most fascinating. Think about it, a show that invites six contemporary artists to curate their influences into a space after artist biography and discussion of influences and inspiration has been on decline in art historical and critical writing for the last thirty years. At a moment where art schools still offer (at least ten years past its prime) The Death of Author as a text as canonical as a contemporary art Iliad, the Hammer museum gives us an unashamed look at inspiration and how artists form themselves and their work. When the Getty Research Institute puts out a book of essays entitled The Life and the Work, a clumsy attempt to encapsulate the hornet’s nest of controversy over art and biography, Garrells gives us a show about the personal relationship between an artist’s work with history and those works which came before it. In a time of critical detachment and the ongoing attempts to put as many catchphrases and slogans between us and artwork, here’s a little humanity.

Inspiration and influence, we find, is a shadowy world where there is a fertile ground for speculation but little room for definite answers. Inspiration is not a clean one to one correspondence – it is not the clichéd Eureka moment, it is not (at least for us mortals) the hot ember burning Isaiah’s lips. Instead, it is shop talk, it is friendships and debates, it is having another artist make you want to be better in your work. In this protean “creation on the fly” world, it is hard to directly say who influenced who or how an outcome came about.

O’Hara’s poem is very articulate on the matter. How, for instance, does O’Hara in the poem move from thinking about oranges to 12 poems, none of which mention oranges at all? How does Mike Goldberg move from thinking about Sardines to a painting without visual reference to sardines? Why does O’Hara call the poems Oranges and Goldberg call the painting Sardines?

And then there’s the poem’s casual gait, its chatty nature, its contentment with “leaving it at that.” There is a suggestion that artists are just fine with such zaniness -- it’s okay, leave the explanation to the geeks and when they make their explanations, well, there’s no need to fret about those either. There’s maybe even a touch of Ad Reinhardt in there: "Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything."

The contentment with inspiration found in the poem can be extended to the Hammer show, except now inspiration is not put forth with a Cedar Tavern swagger but instead with smart acknowledgement. Garrells wants to show us the beautiful heat at the bottom of artistic creation, and this contentment with inspiration comes across as astonishing and fresh, aggressive in its values and in its outright longing for stories and connections and relationships.

Maybe that’s why O’Hara goes through the trouble of assigning so many labels in his poem, each label increasingly unsure of itself? “I am not a painter. I am a poet,” he says. Then at the end, he reminds us again, “I am a real poet.” The truth of the matter is, as demonstrated in his poem as well as Garrell’s show, it doesn’t really matter whether or not O’Hara is a painter or poet or even an artist – what he produces makes him what he is, and that production, difficult to tie down, is what matters, what moves us, what constantly changes in front of our eyes.

The Olives!! How wonderful they were, as I looked on them that day in Greece. How terrible Orange is and life!

Edgar Arceneaux

2008-10-13T16:32:00.000-07:00

Edgar Arceneaux
Susanne Vielmetter Gallery
Through October 25th

Edgar Arceneaux’s show at Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, despite its turbid moments, wants to propose that truth in the world of art is seen differently than in science or religion. Science offers an empirical take on truth, religion offers a spiritual or revelatory take on truth, and art, it seems, is not concerned with truth at all. Art, instead, could be said to be about contextual meaning. Arceneaux, for instance, is “suspicious of truth claims,” as Charles Gaines put it in Issue 10 of Afterall. Science offers the big bang, Religion offers creationism, while in art, concepts like the big bang and creationism coexist and mix in a cauldron of strange meanings and convergences. As in Arceneaux’s show, where you can sift through astrological maps arranged like Da Vinci’s Last Supper, each map color coordinated like the history of stars with red giants and brown dwarfs fully present.

So far, I don’t think I’ve said anything with which most in the visual arts wouldn’t agree. Contextual meaning has been the unapologetic bread and butter of the arts for sometime now. A great example of what contextual meaning involves is Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Library of Babel. In the story, Borges offers an aesthetic and rhetorical (as in “no answer necessary”) unified theory of knowledge without needing to carbon date a fossil or convert someone to Christianity to explain away dinosaurs. In Borges’ library gibberish can exist alongside The Bible and The General Theory of Relativity. A contemporary art museum is Borges’ library, a place where possibilities are endless and where both rubbish and meaning struck together in the hope they start a fire.

More often than not in art made along the lines of science and truth there is neither spark nor fire. The partial visions of science and religion presented (artists and critics are hardly specialists in either) often seem like caricatures. In the face of the elegance and usefulness of mathematics or physics, and the poetry and social import of religion, art comes across sometimes a bit of an apothecary of dubious medicines, more a crazy street crier than an inspiration. Science and Religion offer concise, edited, well thought out theories of truth, human action, and meaning. If art has a problem with some of its theories and truths, then it certainly must do more than simply challenge their validity. Art must offer something as serious and as rigorous as those theories and truths. Art must have a point beyond just saying that the idea of “having a point” is constantly shifting.

Arceneaux’s show brought these troubles to the forefront in my mind. The same Arceneaux who generated fascinating, elegant metaphors and connections in a drawing like Four Fathers, 2002 (which offers a case about how symbols can become racialized) and in The Alchemy of Comedy . . ., 2006 (which apparently worked by locating the similarities between how comedy is developed and alchemy) seems also capable of being impossibly confusing. At times, the show had me thinking everything was completely overwrought and pushed too far, and at other times I felt like things had not been elaborated enough. Symbols and associations kept piling up and spiraling so uncontrollably that I struggled for moments of convergence. Whereas a writer like Lawrence Weschler can go from Da Vinci to Duchamp by way of Russia and leave me completely enchanted, Arceneaux’s attempt to get me from the zodiac to fossils by way of Duchamp left me just muddled and wondering why the paintings were so ugly. (Not entirely fair, I actually really thought Moon creeping through window, 2008 was lovely).

Let me explain further.

Giant fractured glass tripod, 2008 is the center of Arceneaux’s show. The piece is exactly what it says it is in its title – basically a window of broken glass sitting on a tripod, except that the window also contains a skeletal-like form that we know from another painting in the show is the “skeleton of an animal man, tortured soul.” On one side of the piece is a light high in the gallery which shines through the window to the other side, where a couple of shards of glass sit without much fanfare in the corner.

When I say that the piece is the center, I mean both the literal and symbolic center. From and through the piece, metaphors, symbols, allegories, and analogies multiply, repeat, and exhaustively accumulate in the gallery like Borges’ limitless books. I will list just some of these accumulations:

The light (shining out through a circular fixture), on the right hand side of the tripod when you walk in, corresponds to a number of light symbols in the rest of the gallery: the sun/cardboard/moon/orb sculpture in the video room, the projector in the video room, the sun/moon image in the Ophiuchus painting, the moon image in the painting Moon creeping through window, and perhaps each star in each constellation inside the Last Supper Room.

The Giant fractured glass that the tripod holds is a feast of mandarin symbols. A Giant fractured glass, in the arts, must refer to Duchamp’s Large Glass or, more appropriately, to To be looked at (from the other side of the glass) with one eye, close to, for almost an hour, 1918. I like the reference to To be looked at better because then I really start to think about that light filtering through Arceneaux’s sculpture as if it was the eye of Duchamp’s viewer. Arceneaux also must have liked that use of “Giant” in the title instead of “Large” - “Giant” as in red giants.

On the glass is the metal animal-man, which I learned from the gallerist was covered in paint and then imprinted on “skeleton of an animal man, tortured soul.” If we think about that light filtering through and that the animal man is imprinted, then glass is sort of like a camera -- light imprinting on paper. The tripod, in my mind, is then both the tripod that traditionally holds a camera or a painting easel.

So the sculpture could be considered a lens? I think Arceneux meant this to be the case. Why else would the painting on the outside wall of the room use two eyes made of fish in the sky? Fish eyes, Fish eye lens, get it? And furthermore, the fish eyes are in the sky and the fish eye lens was developed to map the night sky.

I pray that I haven’t lost the reader while I’ve tried to make sense of Arceneaux’s exhibition. I have to admit that I’m lost myself. In the midst of this tangle of meanings, looped and folding interpretations, red herrings and trap doors, I wanted to know the point of all of it – assuming that there is a point! I had fun chasing these symbols, but I need more. I want to give Arceneaux the benefit of the doubt in this show because of talent he has shown in the past, but I ultimately had problems with the show.

If I believe Arceneaux’s fans, I guess I could say that my effort to make meaning of the show was the point, and that the show did that well -- it got me involved. I became obsessed like a conspiracy theorist, mapping the gallery in Microsoft Paint and visiting the exhibition three times, obsessing over cracked glass and mutant skeletons. I could agree with Charles Gaines that Arceneaux, like Borges, shows us that “the structure of the topology reveals the structure of the mind that thinks.” Yes, the symbols are in a space and speak to it. How they are oriented in the gallery determines the direction of any attempt to understand the show. Perhaps, as some writers have noted, I could just observe Arceneaux’s studio practice playing out in front of the viewer, exposing its own biases and ideologies.

These assessments, in my mind, are just reiterations of a certain type of artworld speak that has now become cant. They seem to dance around that fact that earlier Arceneaux work seemed to have a tighter grip on its metaphors and symbols than the current show. In its meandering, the current show seems like a failure in comparison – it’s too open, too sloppy, suffering from a lack of editing. Meandering for meandering sake is not enough.

The trouble is only augmented by the show’s ambition – to literally let most of science and religion in, then to offer what amounts to a third term which proposes to reveal limitations in both the knowledge of science and religion. I think of religion: using myths and prayer to interpret physical evidence, forming theories of morality and politics that drive many people in the world to action. I think of science: fixing its Helium leak in France in an attempt to split more protons, collect more data, and learn more truths about the state of universe. And then I think of Arceneaux’s show (and much contemporary art like it): symbols and data culled loosely from both science and religion, simply praising shifting contexts and hoping that something will happen. The show at Vielmetter feels thin, not worthy of the belief (that writers on Arceneaux seem to hold) that somehow this type of art making trumps religion and science, that its “knowledge” that there are indeed no universal truths is somehow helpful. In my mind, it is enough to scare me back to truth.