Byline: Clayton Campbell

“Well-behaved women seldom make history,” asserted historian, Harvard professor, and Pulitzer Prize winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in the 1970s about why women who act in unexpected ways are often remembered, while more conventional women fade into the background. Sarah Lucas is one misbehaving woman if there ever was one. Unashamed and unapologetic, her retrospective exhibition at the Hammer Museum reveals a mid-career artist in full force.

Lucas injects a female sensibility in her references to contemporary art history. Throughout each evolution of her work, from the early 1990s YBA pieces to her most current efforts, she creates new visual strategies that break with conventional behavior. Lucas is a feminist who has never looked back. Given millenniums of patriarchal dominance, the issue of women speaking out is necessarily that of their speaking out of turn. And speak out she does, at every junction in her work, with tremendous humor, British working-class grit, honesty and terrific craft.

There are numerous works that stand out, beginning with the signature piece Au Naturel. Composed of a soiled mattress, two melons, tomatoes, a cucumber, and a bucket, the remnants of a night of gritty coupling has never been so economically portrayed. The title of her first show, Penis Nailed To A Board, was a sign of the “what the fuck is this?” reaction she can still generate. Her self-portraits from Eating a Banana (1990) to the Red Sky Blue (2018) serve as larger social critiques as well as deeply personal statements. In considering the genre of artist self-portraits, hers are a major revelation. They are as revealing as those done by any artist in recent memory and create a wonderful, eclectic body of work.

Lucas has filled the Hammer’s galleries with sculptural projects like Bunny Gets Snookered: stockings stuffed into humanoid forms, thrown over chairs, legs spread wide, vulnerable and violated with everything showing. Adjacent galleries are installed with plaster and wire variations of erect cocks and balls. Throughout the galleries male genitalia are ubiquitous, decorating wallpaper, floating in pictures of soup. Lucas gleefully transforms cocks into a common fetish object in much the way that women with unreal, giant breasts are dehumanized in her British tabloid canvases like Seven-Up from the 1990s. Everyone gets equal time as Lucas’ work upends notions of gender and sexuality.

There are over 130 works in all: the life-size Crucifix covered in cigarettes, the Muse torsos and numerous videos; in total, a body of work with multiple art references that reach far deeper than surface brio. Lucas’ retrospective has been linked to the #metoo and environmental movements, but I feel this would miss the point that she has always been her own person and a singular artist. If her work syncs up with social and political agendas, it is serendipitous. She has been misbehaving from day one.

“Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective” is the first large-scale museum survey devoted to work originally presented by the artist in his museum and gallery exhibitions. It premiered at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and has traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania where it is on view through August 11. It is a terrific send off for an under-recognized artist.

Conrad, who died in 2016 at the age of 76, is one of those uncommonly delightful figures of the second half of the 20th century who privileged disruption over mastery. His instinct was to eschew the pressures to adhere to a specificity of discipline and really lean into interdisciplinary crossovers that now seem ubiquitous. He opened creative possibilities between art and film, film and music, music and performance in contemporary practice that were quickly picked up and acted upon by other artists. He often was the one who got there first. Innovators are not always the ones who reap the rewards, nor do they necessarily want to. Perhaps this is why Conrad is not well known and this exhibition is a revelation.
Anti-gallerist and anti-commerce for much of his career, he taught for a living at the University of Buffalo. He made art that would not, or he would not, sell. An artist’s artist, some knew of him, were influenced and worked with him, like Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, Cory Arcangel and Constance DeJong. Yet even Conrad said of himself, “You don’t know who I am, but somehow, indirectly, you’ve been affected by things I did. I don’t mind being anonymous though.”

As a young man Conrad was already immersed in art and avant-garde music while he studied mathematics at Harvard University. By 1962 he began playing violin with the Theatre of Eternal Music, a pioneering drone-based minimalism project with John Cale, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Angus MacLise and others. For a brief moment he was part of The Primitives, a proto-Velvet Underground band with Lou Reed, Cale, and Walter De Maria. Conrad was also roommates with the pioneer filmmaker and performance artist Jack Smith, and made music for some of Smith’s films.

When he was given film stock from Jonas Mekas, Director of the Anthology Film Archives, Conrad began making groundbreaking films of his own. The first major work that stands out from this propitious moment is The Flicker (1966), an underground work, which literally flickers like a strobe light. It is about the very act of projection itself. The movie is accompanied by a warning that it may cause seizures, and numerous persons have left screenings with headaches and feeling ill.

The exhibition covers an enormous amount of ground and numerous works stand out that evidence Conrad’s restless spirit and sensibility of consistently challenging systems and boundaries. In particular his Yellow Movies (1972-73) are unique, seemingly endless durational works that employ no film or projectors. Elsewhere there are drone instruments he invented that investigate the confluence of harmonics, music and sound. Then in 2016, as perhaps an unintentional parting gesture from someone who seemed to impart a degree of humor in everything he did, there is a hilarious installation of oversized underwear entitled Undone. It bemoans aging and the ridiculous indignity of it all as the body sags and loses its functionality.

Some of his video projects, like the Homework Helpline on Buffalo Learning Television from 1993–97, are especially affecting and unexpected because of their earnestness and kindness. Conrad is just great with kids.

Several movies featured Kelley and Oursler. They were Hail the Fallen (1981) and Beholden to Victory (1983), both war movies, and a B movie genre “women- in- prison” film, Jail Jail (1982–83). In these you see the young artists performing in what seem to be improvisational styles, seemingly without direction. Jail Jail’s set is recreated in the exhibition. It was scheduled to be continued 30 years after its initial shoot, by bringing the actors back, but was cancelled after Mike Kelley’s death.

If Conrad was a free spirit and a restless mind, then he was also The Joker in the midst of an art world that became unrecognizable and market-driven with a cruel speed that almost left him behind. This wonderful exhibition more than makes up for it, and it is a shame he isn’t here to upend it somehow, because given his nature I am guessing that is what he may have planned to do.

The last time I was bowled over by an artist’s installation was Damien Hirst’s Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings at Gagosian, New York in 2000. I have just seen and felt the bar raised again. The artist doesn’t live in New York or London, but in Philadelphia. And the artist is not showing in an upscale art fair in Los Angeles, but in Pittsburgh. Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil installation is an epiphany. It is a wonderful manifestation of curator Ingrid Schaffner’s refreshingly idiosyncratic theme or intention for her 57th installment of the Carnegie International, ‘museum joy.’ Schaffer says, “The aim of this International is simply to inspire museum joy. Simply put: the pleasure of museums comes from the commotion of being with art and other people actively engaged in the creative work of interpretation. Draw on what you know.”

Running from October 15, 2018 through March 25, 2019, the Carnegie International is the second oldest international contemporary arts exhibition. The initial impulse of having this survey was to advance international understanding with a bilateral process of North American and European curators working and consulting together. To curate and select artists, Schaffner worked with “companions” Magalí Arriola (independent curator, Mexico City), Doryun Chong (Chief Curator, M+, Hong Kong), Ruba Katrib (Curator, MoMA PS1, New York), Carin Kuoni (Director, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York), and Bisi Silva (Founder and Artistic Director, The Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, and sadly, passed away on February 12^th of this year at the age of 57) who added to Schaffner’s international research by each traveling with her to destinations new to them. This was the bilateral process desired by Carnegie and carried out by Schaffner in a unique way. Presenting work by 32 artists and artist collectives, the exhibition invites visitors to explore what it means to be “international” at this moment in time, and to experience museum joy in doing so.

To navigate Schaffner’s final concept, there is a smart, scholarly, pleasure-to- read Guide. It is accessible, friendly, doesn’t talk down and also takes the place of absent didactic wall labels. It was refreshing wandering the Carnegie Museum, not being told what to think, or reflexively reading the label first and looking second. Instead there was the joy of following the loosely laid out trail, making discoveries, finding connections, taking breaks, reflecting, reengaging, all without the usual props and instructions. There were guides in each gallery, elaborating on the work. And if needed, kiosks in the museum where friendly people (true, they were friendly) would answer any questions you asked about the show.

Walking up to the museum there is an auspicious beginning. El Anatsui’s monumental installation, Three Angles, made of folded off set printing plates meshed together with one of his signature bottle cap tapestries traverses the entire exterior façade of the museum entrance. It is an out of the box effort by this major artist who doesn’t hold back. We are used to seeing his brand, and he breaks the mold for this commission.

Walking inside, Kerry James Marshall (and an alumni of Otis College of Art in LA) exhibits his complete comic series, Rhythm Mastr that stretches across 70 feet of wall space. First shown in part during the 1999 Carnegie International, it comes full circle with its most up to date incarnation.

Adjacent Marshall is one of the crowd favorites, Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin. Their participatory installation, Fruit and Other Things, needs a context. Between 1896, when the first International opened, and 1931, the Carnegie Museum of Art made open calls for submission by artists for each edition and rejected a total of 10,632 paintings. Records of the unwanted pictures, along with the artists and the dates they were painted, were kept and remain part of the museum’s archive. Clayton and Rubin have hired sign painters to sit in the museum and hand paint the titles of each rejected picture in alphabetical order. These works on paper are then displayed briefly in the galleries and handed out to visitors for free, along with documentation about the original artist and date. You are asked to take one home, frame and photograph it, then send the photo back to Clayton and Rubin, completing the circle.

Cameroonian cultural worker Koyo Kouoh’s Dig Where You Stand brings together artworks, books, and artifacts from the collections of the Carnegie and the Natural History Museum in her excellent show within the show. Kouoh’s project researches the archives and collections of the museum to reflect on coloniality, a concept much in fashion and in other hands might have not led to the provocative and insightful conversations Dig Where You Stand can. Her sensitive and smart juxtapositions of objects and artworks are grouped into three sections, Coloniality & Agency, Speculative Temporalities, and Mobility and Exchange. They deliver on the promise to “prompt dialogue among objects and suggest thematic connections that pervade the whole museum.” Just one example of a potent juxtaposition is Cecil Beaton’s coronation portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, an Egyptian relief of Isis, and a 1968 Beauford Delaney portrait of Carnegie patron Tillie S. Speyer. The power of the women is affirmed yet its potential abuses questioned. One takeaway, which is hard to forget is a bald eagle with glass eyes lying in a case, shot down during the Battle of Gettysburg. On another wall a Kara Walker drawing dominates. The viewer’s head begins to spin in a constructive manner.

Upstairs in a long, ungainly hallway are the funky paintings, ceramics, videos, and dresses of Beverly Semmes and do they cheer the place up! It is fun to walk down this corridor and see an artist strut their stuff. Quirky chiffon fabric flutters off the wall. Slacker-style, bent, fluorescent colored ceramic pots are spread around, attempting to regain their form from the gravity pulling at them. Videos of nerdy models in funky clothing pass in and out of view. Everyone is having fun in a fashion show that feels like Betsey Johnson on acid. Beverly has been at Shoshanna Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica of late, and doesn’t disappoint.

There are many more good artists in this survey. Yuji Agematsu’s tiny sculptures made of everyday debris picked up on one of his daily walks are obsessive and like Japanese packaging, beautiful. Thaddeus Mosley’s totem-like wood sculptures that hold a deep resonance and commanding presence in their indoor/outdoor settings are quietly majestic.

Saba Innab’s work, an abstract ruin of concrete and steel that mimics a tunnel dug out by the embattled citizens of Gaza, is installed adjacent the Greek sculptures, and this juxtaposition makes the work poignant and disturbing. British hotshot Jeremy Deller has installed tiny television screens into the museum’s permanent galleries of miniature period rooms. They are funny and mildly intrusive. Karen Kilimnik’s humorous and sly interventions of her quirky paintings and objects insinuate themselves into the decorative arts collection, and feel right at home. Mel Bochner’s one-liner text paintings are playful, punchy, and can be a lot of things to lots of people. There are many more; the books as art installations of Dayanita Singh, or the wonderful ceramic wall installation by Sarah Crowner.

But let’s get to Alex Da Corte. He had a show at Mass Moca in 2016 with lots of neon, brash colors, baubles decorating surfaces, some damn good video work, interesting Queer art, collaborating and mashing in the work of his friends and their alter egos. He has been coming on strong and is sought after for a budding post pop formality. MassMoca was a jump for him from where he had been. Sometimes that is what it takes, giving an artist the platform they need to stretch themselves so their ideas leave the realm of the conceptual and make that leap. With his commission for the Carnegie International, he has made another, more quantum leap with work that is so good, so magical, that everyone who sees it remembers it.

Andrew Russeth, writing in ArtNews on October 15, 2018, said the following, and I agree and love the way he writes about Da Corte: “ It is the best work in the show, and one of the most thrilling I’ve seen in recent years—the rare example, in this International, of an artist swinging for the fences and hitting it out of the park. A giant Heinz bottle is jumping around, freaking out because it’s holding a lit stick of dynamite. The Wicked Witch of the West is singing LeAnne Rimes, improbably accompanied by Oscar the Grouch. Bugs Bunny is sitting on a cartoon crescent moon, crooning Frank Ocean. Then, as ambient music plays, Da Corte walks slowly through the door of a familiar looking set. He’s dressed as Mister Rogers (who shot his children’s TV show nearby), wearing one of his brightly colored sweaters, smiling warmly to the camera and sitting down to change his shoes. Pretty soon he’s out the door, returning a moment later in a different sweater, switching his shoes once more and departing. He does it again and again, arriving each time in a new sweater and with the same joyful hello to the audience. It’s by turns hilarious and sad, and more than a little dark, but as he keeps going, something else happens: it begins to have the feel of an epic. It’s moving—heroic, even. He—Rogers, Da Corte—is striving to get the job done as well as he can. Like us all, he’s putting on his best face, trying to get through the day.”

And there you have it. The bar has been raised, and you can experience it for yourself at the Carnegie International through March 25^th. Go feel some museum joy. No hustle, no agenda, nothing to prove, nothing to put a price on. Just for the love of art, the artists who make it, and people all around you digging it.

Clayton Campbell is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, and his latest E-Publication of photographs, short stories and commentary, Tales From the Downslope; But Picking Up Speed Really Fast can be downloaded at; www.claytoncampbell.com/book-store/

Iraqi-born, Los Angeles artist Susu Attar opened an expansive exhibition on October 20^th filling LA’s very own The Mistake Room with dynamic paintings made on long scrolls of white paper. Entitled Isthmus, TMR Deputy Director Kris Kuramitsu curated the wonderfully designed installation, and the effort was achieved with support from The Main Museum’s artist in residence program.

Upon entering the large gallery, I was struck by uncanny use of overall space with an economy of means and how it was so mathematically balanced in a room that could have been problematic by its size. Scrolls of paper hung from the high ceilings in the middle of the space, off the perimeter walls, or lay in the middle of the floor—all in precise spots that filled the volume yet assumed a lightness as if large kites were adrift throughout the room. On the scrolls were images of bodies and body parts, painted with raw and ragged energy isolated on the white paper. They floated in the air and captured viewer’s immediate attention with their seeming defiance of gravity for something potentially so emotional and heavy. I felt a brief fleeting reference that a Francis Bacon painting could had exploded into many parts and been captured by the artist in a mystic web of stunning contemporary illogic as Susu enters a new realm entirely with her painting project.

I worked briefly with Susu Attar last summer in Little Tokyo when she was artist in residence at the Little Tokyo Service Center. I was coordinating the larger residency program, and became familiar with some of her work at that time, and we had several discussions about it. Yet the current effort at TMR was my first opportunity to experience a full body of her work created with a clear through line for a solo exhibition. We discussed this work and what it brought up in terms of ideas, images, and context of this moment in time.

 CC: Isthmus is defined often as a piece of geography, but less commonly as a narrow organ, passage, or piece of tissue connecting two larger parts. How did you come up with the title of your show, and its relation to the body parts that are painted on the sheets of paper hung as scrolls about The Mistake Room?
SA: The Arabic equivalent is actually what inspired it. Barzakh, is not only the geography and the organ, but also the partition between the spirit world and the material world as well as past, present, and future as a whole. What I like about this word is that can be an unseen material (like the uterus), a visible part of earth that contains land, water and the sky above it, and back to the unseen in reference to the spirit world and to time. It can symbolize many things at once. 

CC: The press release states that your practice is exploring ways images of embodied subjects circulate in a media saturated world and how this digitized circulation impacts the meaning-making potential of pictures. What exactly do you mean by this? What is an embodied subject in your case and in this show? Are these your images from your photos, or where did they come from, and isolated from their source and put into a context like The Mistake Room in a painterly context, what then happens?
SA: These are bodies that are typical subjects of violence and that are disproportionately subjected to violence. We see this within a multitude of contexts like war, police brutality, or even gender as is the case with women. 

I’m interested in the narratives that are shaped by media about these bodies, more importantly, these peoples, through images of their bodies. Any group of people whose story is dominated by media narrative are forced to navigate that narrative in their daily lives, and when attempting to tell their own stories. But at that point, you are trying to convince people that you are not what they think you are, and that is virtually impossible. So, the connection between news media and narrative, desensitization and expectation formation, and limits of imagination and limits to progress are all at play here. 

These are images from news media that I collect. These particular images come from the US and Iraq. Yes, these are countries I’m from but more importantly, these are the subjects of violence I witness in real life. I remove them from the context of the photograph to emphasize the violence, the lack of context, to focus on the posture of the body and to create a moment of possibility for the meaning of that posture. 

I was invited by TMR to do a sort of residency in their space for several weeks to experiment with concepts we’d been in conversation about. I started to think of the space as a sort of canvas and the arrangement of the bodies and paper like composing elements on that canvas. The paper has a sculptural quality to them that adds the language of object to the subjects. The subjects are not all the same but they do share some qualities and they share the space. Each painting is an individual piece and a part of the spacial composition, the installation. 

The subjects are in the context of violence but are not all directly experiencing violence. For example, playfulness in a war zone or protest against police brutality. It’s a meditation on the postures and the possibilities of their meaning when removed from the context of media and repositioned in space. Then the viewer’s body and the subject’s body are in conversation with one another. 

CC: Artists have been challenging the space between photography and painting, but what does that mean to you? What is the challenge anymore and why does it need challenging? Aren’t the two spaces pretty well distinct, or is there something about them that overlaps and needs further exploration?
SA: Painting can suggest reality and fantasy at the same time. Proportions, shapes, and colors, can lead us in and out of the illusion of reality. Photography gives the viewer the sense of seeing reality, the sense that the viewer has witnessed something—without truly witnessing. Ultimately, a photograph is an edited version of reality, and it relies on captions to provide context. Painting is a way to offer the viewer (and the painter) a chance to interpret, to take responsibility for our interpretation, and to allow room for differing interpretations.   

CC: Your images come from contexts of violence and turmoil, and when isolated does this allow for an empathy, the hoped for meditation or bearing witness you might seek? Can you elaborate on all of this in the spirit of the transformative potential of the artistic gesture, which is mentioned as one of your values?
SA: I hope so. I paint first for myself. To see something, to understand better. For me, the process is most certainly an offering of empathy, of bearing witness to the subject and —in this case—- mourning for them. 

I hope that the ambiguity offered in the painting and in the installation create space for interpretation. The transformative potential starts with our imaginations as viewers and extends that possibility to the subjects. I want to imagine humanity as limitless and I want people to imagine themselves that way too. Painting is the language I’m using here to exercise these values for myself, in conversation with myself. That’s the only way I know how to discover what conversation is needed next. 

After painting these bodies I began to feel the need to mourn for them through the work. The mediums it was calling for at that point were music and movement. What resulted is a collaboration with musicians Sandra Lawson-Ndu and Sheila Govindarajan on an experimental music performance that’s inspired by practices of communal grief. (There will be a performance of this at The Mistake Room on November 14^th at 7:30PM)

CC: Is the show linked in any way to the topical, or the socio-political landscape we inhabit in this cultural moment and if so, how would you describe your attention to it as an object maker, a creative person, a person of the world?
SA: Yes. It is the news I am reading as an American about America. That being said, I don’t see it as political work. Now of course, life is political. However, to me, this show is about the spiritual. I observe, experience and contemplate life and I try to take responsibility for what I know. What captures my attention is interconnectivity and imagination. Ultimately, that’s what I’m seeking to explore and exercise through my work. 

Isthmus will run through December 8, 2018 at The Mistake Room, 1811 E. 20^th Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90058. To contact, 213-747-1200; www.tmr.la

Susu Attar (b. 1982) is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.  Her work has been included in exhibitions in Montreal, Mexico City, San Francisco, Dubai, and Minneapolis, among other cities. In 2018, she held two artist residencies in Los Angeles: one at The Main Museum, and the other as one of the inaugural participants in the +LAB Artist Residency through the Little Tokyo Service Center. She was also a finalist for the 2018 Los Angeles Artadia Award. Attar’s practice extends to theatrical production and exhibition curating. Notably, she is a member of the SEPIA Collective, a women of color art collective whose work includes a traveling exhibition, ICONIC: Black Panther, in which artists respond to the legacy of the Black Panther Party. She has also co-produced and designed Haram, an experimental theatrical production inspired by the poetry of Dr. Maher Hathout. She holds a BA from San Francisco State University in Painting and Conceptual Information Art. 

Clayton Campbell is an artist, writer and cultural producer based in Los Angeles, working locally, nationally and internationally. www.claytoncampbell.com , claytoncampbellconsulting.com