Byline: Ezrha Jean Black

I have an ongoing conversation with Karen Finley that operates on several levels, one of which is simply her public conversation; i.e., the level on which her work has made its enduring imprint on the culture and more specifically the phenomenon of cultural trauma.

Our “live” conversation has been going on since 2015, around the time of her The Jackie Look performances in LA and the companion “Love Field” gallery show, in which she broke down the “Jackie” narrative—the discrete layers of trauma bound up in the interwoven narratives of Jacqueline Onassis’ lives—into its most resonant incidents, performances, props and gestures.

There’s an interesting resonance to her work right now in that, for many of us, the last four years have been a period of unbroken cultural trauma, magnified by an unparalleled political trauma and an environmental trauma without precedent afflicting the entire planet. The Covid-19 pandemic and attendant shutdowns in New York, California and points between have given an additional dimension to her projects as her interactions in the public sphere have migrated to electronic screens and cell phones.

Not unlike a billion or so of my fellow earthlings, I have an off-again, on-again relationship with social media. Off Facebook (mostly), and on Facebook-controlled (alas) Instagram. Although Finley is most celebrated for her performance work, the often stark pictogramic imagery that has often accompanied her published transcriptions and parable-like narratives and prose-poems, summarizing their deep psychological and cultural deconstructions, continue to show up on her own Instagram feed.

Not long before CV-19 hit New York like a cyclone, she had a series of drawings, entitled “The Dreams of Ivanka Trump,” that seemed to feed off the energy from her 2019 “Sext Me If You Can” series. But sometime around the vernal equinox, the feed abruptly shifted to word drawings in watercolor or pen and ink that placed a single word, sometimes burnished with color or a coppery gold, in a shadowy gray, miasmic field: Covid, mask, corona, quarantine; and so forth. These gradually gave way to short phrases, often laid out on printed pages—pages ripped from old poetry anthologies, children’s storybook pages, calendars, cookbook recipes, advertising, flash cards, sheet music—which might sardonically emphasize or ironize the word or intention behind it. More often, though, the message has been pretty direct: Scrawled vertically across a telephone message pad in one such post (with each message slip marked [To] ‘Trump’/[From] ‘Fauci’ (and signed by ‘Pence’): SHUT / THE / FUCK / UP.

There are shifts in the feed that reflect the mood or the moment, the events pressing in on all of us—though they can sometimes take us by surprise. As with almost anything that shows up on one’s mobile device, much depends upon when the image is viewed. Awakening to Finley’s IG post, White Blank Stare (2020) after some days away from my last digital encounter, I found myself sorting through the trauma of youthful repression underlying my default resting bitch persona, rather than the unconscious white privilege the image (at second glance) clearly addressed. It was at some point into my second cup of coffee (and laughing at myself), I decided it was time to catch up with Karen Finley.

It was more than a month later, not long after the Republican National Convention, when we finally caught up via (what else?) Zoom. After a bit of my own contextualizing, and the recent context of her Instagram (by way of Michelle Obama: “It is what it is.”), we picked up where we left off.

Ezrha Jean Black: So where are we now? Where are you now?
Karen Finley: I think that’s what we’re all kind of asking ourselves. I have a double consciousness of where we are now. I have the day-to-day living of just experiencing what we’re all going through under the pandemic and through the regime of Trump, and the day-to-day realities of what is happening in ways I’ve never experienced in my life: with the pandemic, with the protests. Although I did grow up with protest, looking at the extreme violence coming from the leadership, from the White House, the authoritarian rule with the continuing lies—yes, I lived through Nixon, the FBI, the police state we’re all aware of; but in this moment, we’re in desperate times. Yet I am inspired by what has been happening with the protests. And since I’m not able to be putting a lot of my energy into performing, the urgency is invested in the response I create with my artwork. I’m responding from a kind of social critic’s perspective, but also narrowing it down to something very specific. It’s an artist’s perspective as kind of a historical recorder of the times we’re living in. It looks quick and spontaneous, but it does take a certain amount of thought and practice in getting it—to look at the idea, to manipulate the subtexts, so I’m layering it over images in terms of the political work. Or even, let’s say, what I was doing today, which came out of the conversation we were just texting each other about, thinking about the RNC and looking at the portrayals, the costuming, the gender presentation for the Trump women—which almost went to the level of a costume horror show. All of the women had this Night of the Living Dead or Frankenstein kind of look with the black eyeliner; and with Melania, her eyes set back to such an extent. They looked like something out of the Addams Family—and that had comedy in it—but it almost looks like Morticia.

That might be giving them too much credit.
It’s like a horror show. And I was thinking of this idea of the Dark Shadows, the Trump Shadows. So that’s what I wanted to be doing today. I think they really are projecting a kind of horror family, the monsters that they are. There was a sense of monstrosity in the way that they presented themselves Thursday night. Besides their action now, that you really see …who was the Trump girlfriend who spoke?

You must be referring to Kimberly Guilfoyle. Yeah—she was something!
[Then ensued a brief deconstruction of the Guilfoyle Evita/Bananas/The Maids performance.] And also Melania had that khaki-green outfit she was wearing—it was like military garb.

The whole thing looked a bit militarized. And of course she had to mow down half the Rose Garden to be a better backdrop for her new military look.
It looked like it was absent of nature, like they’d removed it.

Well they removed that entire row of crabapple trees.
[We then thrashed out the Melania-Ivanka psychological dynamics for a minute or so, while we practiced shade-throwing eye rolls.]

It’s horrific; and I’m so concerned about taking this situation and making art out of it. What are these borders of art as an escape, an entertainment, as this space within which it’s palatable to be creating this work; where it’s decorative—what are those places?

But I’m just interested in hosting it. I’ve been doing much more work than that. But I don’t want to put everything on [Instagram].

But there’s a consistent through line. It’s not a gesture, it’s not simply a word. You’re really deconstructing it, following every implication of the word, gesture, image—breaking it down, exploring it at the most basic psychosexual level—and I think you have to go there, because what we’re addressing here is this kind of authoritarianism that has never been so nakedly exposed. Certainly not like this—in lights, against the most officially sanctioned stage in the world.
I’m not necessarily doing it to be converting people, but I’m trying to offer a way of taking a deeper look—to do what art does. I feel that’s part of my job as an artist, and I take that job seriously. Can I say that it’s part of my artistic service? And because I’m not able to be performing—it’s not about performing for the camera, my voice—I’m not interested in putting me in there. It’s about what I’m inspired to be doing now within the visual work right now.

I will say that I look at these things as once upon a time I looked at the drawings, sketches in the book versions [of collected performance work]. In that I can see performance coming from this. In that it goes from a word to a phrase to a kind of poetic fragment, to a kind of chant, or incantation, through to fully fledged performance. You know how to evolve these things.
I think that has always been part of what my creative response has been.

I was just recently speaking with the choreographer Miguel Gutierrez about the NEA (he’s doing a series of podcasts—so I had to re-live that period again) and thinking about artists’ responses in the 1990s. What seems to have happened in a strange way is that more young people are adapting methods we were developing then. So it’s more familiar, easier for me, for them to be doing it. So there’s a lot of incredibly interesting work going on right now, and I’m inspired by it.

[Finley singled out two other artists—Amy Khoshbin and John Sims—and we discussed their work briefly.]

So that‘s the contrast—between the familiarity, the politics of the times—whether you go back to the 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, Vietnam war, Iraq war, the Civil Rights Movement—and the art and response coming out of it. I’m not surprised. I mean I’m devastated. But there’s a familiarity. The latest [performance] work I’ve been developing over the last two years was about a certain paralyzing trauma I see being acted out—sometimes by people you know or are acquainted with. They behave as if they were in agony, traumatized, can’t leave their houses—just refusing to look at what’s happening. They can’t believe what they’re seeing in the news and are completely paralyzed by it. And I find that’s just such a form of whiteness. I mean, where were they? ‘Where were you during the Reagan years?’ Or, looking at the Bushes—getting us into the [Iraq] war. Or thinking about the FBI and everything that they have done to so many people, from the Black Panthers to protesters. You want to see a horrible time? That was horror. People get almost nostalgic. People saying, ‘Oh my god, I miss the Bushes; I miss Laura so much.’

[This stops me dead in my tracks for a split second. ]

Wait—but these aren’t really pals, people you know.
No, but they’re people that you can see, who have the sense that this time, what’s happening now, has never happened before. I think this is a feeling you see in different places throughout America.

Because there was the veneer of civility that, thanks to people like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, has suddenly been violently ripped away. The veneer that masked the actuality of, maybe not kids in cages, but black mass incarceration—a reality, an ongoing reality. There’s no dressing it up.
But it could also be part of my denial, too. I mean it is a horrible time, so you have to watch out for this sense of, ‘Oh it’s been like this before’—that’s a kind of denial, too; you have to focus the determination to make sure that there’s accountability. And I do have a real fear, with this election, of it becoming more authoritarian—I have real fears about the election. There is a real difference between having him [Trump] in that office, that regime, and Biden and Harris. And I’m aware of their histories.

[We briefly discuss their political, prosecutorial histories here.]

Both of them. I’m rolling my eyes here—like Melania!
Yes, both of them. And Anita Hill—there’s a lot there.

And there was a lot more there; and we carried it forward a bit, from politics, to climate change, anxiety—and the humor and perspective we use to pull ourselves through it.

 

While Finley’s next print and performance works are still in development, her Instagram feed continues: @the_yam_mam—a must for this new-old age of anxiety.

I learned yesterday—along with most of the Los Angeles art world –that John Baldessari had died.  (He had actually died Thursday, but the word filtered out only this week-end.)  Long before I knew him or what he represented (not only in Los Angeles, but the world), and long before I wrote about fine arts in Los Angeles, I would see him frequently at art gallery openings.  (I always had many artist friends; and in Los Angeles it was easy to fall into the habit of keeping an eye open for developments on that front.)  There were odd jags when I would see him at several in a row, often in the same evening.   

You couldn’t miss him.  He was almost always the tallest man in the room and, even in his minimalist, pared down artist/teacher’s style of dress (usually a simple T-shirt or sweater and jeans), the most distinctive—with his thatch of white hair fringing his forehead and short white beard; and everyone seemed to know him.  In other words, even before I knew him as the godfather of L.A. conceptualism, he was clearly the godfather of at least half the L.A. art world.  He was by that time already quite famous – though it seemed as much by association with other artists as by his own work, some of which was already the stuff of legend.  Even then, the scope of his influence hadn’t quite hit me. 

The ‘legend’ finally saw ‘print’ in his hometown not long thereafter with his 1990 mid-career retrospective at MOCA; and it was probably only then that I began to ‘connect the dots.’  It was certainly the first time I began to fully contextualize his place in the larger art world (though even then I did not grasp the global reach of his influence).  This was a way different kind of ‘cool’:  cerebral but grounded; distilled more than abstracted; and informed by the entirety of actual and variously filtered or mediated experience.  It seemed immaterial to me at the time that he had abandoned painting, or what might be considered traditional art media and the notion of hand facture. 

But this abandonment was more than a mere gesture, in a post-Duchamp, post-Warhol sense.  In retrospect it seems of a piece with his work in other media—not simply the text paintings, though they certainly presaged it, but the later ‘commissioned’ paintings (with their pointing fingers), and the early photographic series that played on visual syntax, rhyming, conjunctions and disjunctions—works which reached a kind of zenith in his works with film noir stills.  His insight into the syntax of commercial narrative was uncanny.  No one understood cut, composition, and dissolve like Baldessari (with a few possible exceptions, e.g., Godard).  But Baldessari was moving towards a kind of metacritical art—preoccupied no longer with composition, but with the notion of composition; not time, but the notion of time (naturally using art itself—e.g., his proto-canon of contemporary art history).  He was moving beyond Conceptualism before he was even through with it. 

I had the opportunity to interview him for ARTILLERY in 2010 in conjunction with the Tate Modern-LACMA exhibition, Pure Beauty.  By that time I knew him slightly; but Baldessari was not exactly an easy interview.  Still he managed to be thoughtful and good-humored about the whole thing.  (I was able to tease him about his then dismissal of art-fashion collaborations only a few years later when I saw him at Gemini G.E.L.—not long after he had executed a project for Saint Laurent—which he again took with good humor.)  I took some issue at the time with his resurrection of that old chestnut from his text paintings for the show’s title.  At that moment (only a decade ago?), it seemed disingenuous and almost simplistic.  Now in 2020, it makes a kind of circle-game sense:  not a pure beauty—after all, he saw the language of images in the fullness of their simultaneous humor and horror—but a beauty of the pure.  Baldessari was after that kind of reduction, a kind of DNA of visual art, and perhaps the sublime itself.  And in true Baldessari fashion, he wanted us to reconceive our notion of the sublime—a 100-proof distillation that might soothe and burn, dazzle and terrify all at once.   

 

 

Kristy Edmunds took over the reins of performing arts at UCLA at a time (2010–11) when the kind of avant-garde international theater and festival programming it was famous for seemed to be all but dropping from UCLA’s sightlines. But Edmunds’ purpose and seriousness were conveyed in the rebranding alone: the Center for the Art of Performance (“CAP” UCLA). Within a year, we had a treatment of the work of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki by Complicité, Peter Brook and the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, a raft of new music, and a reunion of Robert Wilson, Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs; and Edmunds was just getting started.

Edmunds went on to make CAP UCLA a case study in how to transform an arts institution, and how to bond it to the artists and the community it serves. In essence, she has done that by taking an artist’s approach to programming by transforming the creative and curatorial process to them.

Another of her achievements has been a major expansion of CAP UCLA’s physical presence beyond the UCLA campus into the Village and across town at the ACE Hotel, which is more or less where our conversation began.

The decision to expand CAP’s programming to alternative spaces was deliberate, Edmunds confirms. “I began to understand the extraordinary complexity of traffic and logistics and also the changing demographics: where artists are moving, the cultural enclaves and pockets of folks on the East Side… If people can’t get to us with the frequency they desire, can I find the vehicles that will bring the work closer to them? So the ACE partnership was one of those things. Moving a third of our programming into the downtown area was really about creating another point of access for the artists and the work and the communities.”

It is a complex equation, a kind of choreography, to connect these worlds. In another part of our conversation, Edmunds summed up the creative aspect of her role in that equation: “We have to have as much lithe and nimble erudition as an artist will to put the work in the context in which it’s going to mean the most.”

Audiences are seeing the evolution, and elevation in the standard and their own expectations, and the sense of what is driving this endeavor: a commitment to work across any number of media in pursuit of original ideas, forms and ways of thinking about and making sense of the contemporary world. Edmunds is fully committed to creating the conditions essential to achieving an artist’s vision and bringing the project forward.

“Every single dialogue and discussion with artists means I’m going to eventually end up on a pretty bespoke journey with them,” she explains. “If upholding the integrity of their vision as it’s evolving is part of the practice that I hold, then staying close to what those ideas are matters a great deal. It’s not just transactional.”

When asked if she shapes the programming with the intention of building community, Edmunds affirms, “Absolutely. It’s about what is the role of an artist in cultures across the world and inside a city of this size that the whole world lives in—either temporarily or permanently. For me it’s been about how I program in a way that is taking the artists with an extraordinary generosity of vision that they’re willing to put in front of the questions of our time and the questions they have with their art form, and to give it as much context for an audience as I can, so that they get… not just, ‘do I like the work, thumbs-up or down?’—but: Who is this maker, and in what conditions are they making? And why would they go to such extraordinary lengths to call our attention to something that might be less familiar, and certainly disruptive of the status quo, in order to open us to be awake to the world differently?”

For all her breadth and commitment to the fresh and unfamiliar and nurturing the formal evolution of performing artists, she is careful to place some distance between her own enthusiasms and institutional prerogatives. “The worst thing I can do is privilege my personal aesthetic preferences,” she says. “If I condition people to respond to work that I like, then I’m denying the role and responsibility of an institutional practice. I have to be able to connect people to what is going to have integrity and meaning for them, with these artists in these specific sets of conditions—so that everyone can thrive together.”

Edmunds’ process involves helping artists shape their work, and bringing it to CAP UCLA’s various stages and alternative spaces. At any given time, Edmunds is conducting about 300 active conversations with artists, managers, producers and agents. Out of these, the CAP budget will expand to do 45 to 55 projects over a given set of years.

“But that’s probably about the amount an institution is going to be able to mind-share with an audience that’s already over-worked, overtaxed, over-stressed can even handle anyway!” she adds.“So I try to drill as deeply as I can in the principal art forms we’re focused on, and that tends to be five or six [major] productions or concerts a year. And then there are the areas that are signaling where artists are going—interdisciplinary collaborations or projects that are not squarely dance or choreography but might involve visual artist collaborations or a very unique way that a composer is addressing a cultural question in their work, and so forth.”

Beyond the daunting difficulties in staging large productions in Los Angeles, are the many problems in facilitating the movement of international elements.

“There’s a lot of reshuffling that goes on… I constantly feel as if I’m in an air traffic control station, seeing which planes can land and with what magnitude,” she says. “Which ones have to keep circling? In the complexity of humanity, there’s almost one project that’s programmed into the season; and then life happens… and it can’t happen. But there’s something real about that, too. When I have to tell our audiences that a project has to be postponed, it’s not like they see it as institutional failure. The reality is people understand now. When I think of the number of artists and practitioners who actually land and arrive here, or are local—our fellows—and have managed to be able to pull residency, creative development with us, find form and get that work on stage, it’s gobsmacking.”

In the last season, such artists included Jérôme Bel (“Gala”), Meredith Monk (“Cellular Songs”—which made for a kind of prelude to Yuval Sharon’s LA Phil production of her “Atlas”), Merce Cunningham (“Night of 100 Solos”) and Nico Muhly (a deep dive into the music of Philip Glass). Kaija Saariaho returns this season (collaborating in a multi-media production of Eliot’s Four Quartets), as does Jean-Claude Barrière, alongside Toshi Reagon’s musical treatment of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Michael Keegan-Dolan’s fantastical Nordic-Irish reincarnation of Swan Lake, among too many others to recite here.

The reverberations of last season seem to flow forward and back from Taylor Mac’s four night/24 decade ‘moment’ (A 24-Decade History of Popular Music). Revisiting that triumph, Edmunds conveys a sense of how she builds the connections between the artists and the audiences for an institution. “I look for where an artist making theater or choreography or whatever form—in order to add some authentic perspective—is bypassing the conventions they already know to allow an audience to be provoked to actually be more emotionally available to seeing something from a different angle, as opposed to the perceived security of going along with the conventional route or wisdom. Building a framework of an audience’s belonging, coming in and out of an institution, is asking people to remember that value proposition: that artists are not here to merely decorate our stages or reinforce our complacency. They’re provoking us to being awake differently and to use more of ourselves towards what they’re thinking about. If the performances are extraordinary, we will go there.”

By the time my studio visit with Francesca Gabbiani is winding up, the conversation has turned to Griffith Park. We talk about our respective walks, and various neglected areas of the Park—the depleted bird sanctuary and abandoned spaces and cages near the Zoo—and the spirits that haunt those spaces. Gabbiani became obsessed with the dark history of the Park’s benefactor, Griffith J. Griffith. Less than a decade after the 3,000-acre bequest that became his namesake park, he nearly killed his wife, Christina, by shooting her in the eye, leaving her permanently disfigured—a crime for which he served two years in prison.

Something of Christina’s spirit may remain in the park; but our fascination speaks of a more extensive legacy of human and wild life marking the landscape. Coyotes can occasionally be heard howling in the early evening and their alarm signals a warning beyond their dark sanctuary.

You sense the “call of the wild” in Gabbiani’s work, even through its intense artifice and deliberation. Beyond the elaborate mapping and breakdown of the image (whether physical landscape, domestic or interior space, or what we might just call the dark vortex of the imagination) preparatory to its rendering in the cut colored papers and various pigmented media (inks, gouache, watercolor, acrylics) she has made her signature, her process is a decoding and recoding, a continuous reconsideration of places, their constituent phenomena, and what we might call, in perceptual terms, their “aura.”

Situated on the flanks of Atwater Village, Gabbiani’s studio has the feel of a refuge on the gray day I visit her. We trade notes about some of the shows we’ve taken in the night before—and I’m not at all surprised to hear she admired the same John Divola “running figure” photographs I did at a downtown gallery. I mention the abandoned, vandalized shacks, sheds, boathouses and the like Divola brought to vivid life in the late 1970s that resonate with Gabbiani’s recently exhibited work. “He’s done that in photos and I have, too.” Gabbiani’s view takes a broader, exteriorized view in this work, but it is the continuity with her earlier work I pursue in our conversation.

Gabbiani has fixed her eye upon many film-worthy houses and domestic interiors since her arrival in Los Angeles in 1995. At one point in our conversation, she mentions one of the first she sighted driving around Los Angeles—an “Asian-looking house” that appeared in John Cassavetes’ 1976 film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. As I follow her around the studio, the movie pedigree of other images from past works or works in progress is disclosed—between fires, a subject she returns to in her most recent work (“spectacles, I call them”)—an ironic segue from the surreal horror films and LA film noir that have been a constant inspiration in her work. “This is a real house on fire—well it’s actually a dollhouse from [Terrence Malick’s 1973 film] Badlands.”

The darkness goes back as far as the abandoned houses and spaces she once occupied as a squatter after leaving school in Geneva. “There were all these empty spaces. They were very dark; the staircases could break, but all those empty houses and spaces became a refuge.”

The tenuous refuge or sanctuary is another through-line in her work—the disused or abandoned site that becomes a vehicle of transformation. “Why is it a refuge even though it’s scary?” She returns momentarily to Bachelard’s notion of the “attic or cellar” that might be regarded as a nest; and “why does it feel like home? I can stay there because I can change it maybe.”

“I kind of make it fantastical.” Gabbiani trails off here, but seems to confirm the connection between tenuous sanctuary and the elements of fantasy, even horror, that might be invited in right alongside. “I’m interested in the ephemerality of those spaces,” she says, “if there is an ephemerality to them.”

The fire in one sense or another has never been far off. Gabbiani has been no less moved by the “spectacle” of the recent wildfires and their destruction than the rest of the city, and she recently turned her attention to the aftermath of the burn—not so much the charred landscape that might be yet another black ground, but the smoke and miasma of debris clouding the atmosphere. “I’m trying to work on smoke. There were a few times I’d been on hikes when the mountains were on fire; and I’d be looking at mountains surrounded by smoke. So how do I do smoke?” Gabbiani shows me an array of fragments in sfumato variations—smoky indigos, blue-grays and inky blacks, mostly in watercolor and gouache. The atmospheric studies become a fresh groundwork for “the fluidity of the paint and the opacity of the paper” on a technical level, and perhaps an exploration of chaos—a systemic ephemerality on another level.

I make no claim as to the comprehensiveness or objectivity of this selection. Nevertheless, to the extent that it reflects personal priorities, I believe most artists, if not the entire art community, both local and international, acknowledge the existential criticality of the moment. In one way or another, each of these exhibitions has engaged this moment as it intersects with a specific place or places—fractured foundations extending no further than consciousness and destined to vanish. As always, beauty is privileged, the sublime revered.

 

 

Outliers and American Vanguard Art
LACMA
In an age of catastrophic displacements, LACMA’s (and the National Gallery’s) exhibition surveyed an intersectional expansion of consciousness between the culturally endorsed and what the conventional critical discourse can’t (or won’t) process.

 

 

 

 

Merion Estes: Unnatural Disasters
Craft & Folk Art Museum
This compact retrospective was an aurora borealis to throw light not merely on the Sixth Extinction, but the attenuated human consciousness that set it in motion—and Estes shows us beauty in the dying light.

 

 

A grammar built with rocks (Carmen Argote, Julien Creuzet, DAAR, Sandra de la Loza, Regina José Galindo, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys, Zara Kuredjian, Uriel Orlow, Gala Porras-Kim, Susan Silton, Cauleen Smith)
Human Resources
A geo-cultural archaeology of the human trace, the stain of consciousness and identity, the violence and social politics of survival—a break-through intersection of art and natural history.

 

 

Christopher Russell: Explorers
Von Lintel Gallery
Russell’s work deconstructs romance to stoke fires both sacred and profane—an acid IV-drip seeping into consciousness subliminally to set our synapses on fire.

 

 

Channa Horwitz: Structures
Ghebaly Gallery
Possibly the best exhibition of Horwitz’s groundbreaking work to date, the show put both the rigorous musicality and architectural scope of her work on display to sublime effect.

 

 

 

Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965–2016
Hammer Museum
Underappreciated in the U.S., Piper’s work comes as an austere yet exuberant wake-up call: “Everything will be taken away”—she’s not kidding around.

 

 

 

Francesca Gabbiani: Vague Terrains/Urban Fuckups
Gavlak Gallery
Gabbiani’s dark mirror visions have gradually given way to the quotidian nightmare, and she is fearless and alive to it, reclaiming beauty from the ruins.

 

 

 

Danial Nord: Cloud Nine
Torrance Art Museum
Nord’s installation effectively walked us through hell’s gates and into its ninth circle, i.e., the contemporary human condition, showing us how our hyper-connected, mediated society manages to function in nature, yet simultaneously against nature.

 

 

Jess: Secret Compartments
Kohn Gallery
A cross-section of the most formative periods of Jess’s work, this museum-scale exhibition gave full-throated voice to the disparate beauties from the enigmatic to Arcadian Jess prized from the crevices of his imagination and the world beyond.

 

 

Stones to Stains: The Drawings of  Victor Hugo
Hammer Museum
Hugo, acknowledged literary master, is revealed in this exhibition as visual artist of jaw-dropping visionary power, anticipating 20th century developments as diverse as abstract expressionism, art brut, and Raymond Pettibon.

 

Honorable Mentions

Nicole Eisenman: Dark Light, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

Roland Reiss: Unrepentant Flowers and New Miniature Tableaux, Diane Rosenstein Gallery

Julie Curtiss: Altered States, Various Small Fires

Bamboo, Craft & Folk Art Museum

William Lamson: Badwater, Make Room

As we raked through ashes in California, reminded that we had already entered an anthro-obscene geological epoch, the most “important” of the Fall 2018 art auctions were already taking place, with records dropping every step of the way—Hopper, Hockney, Jack Whitten, Jacob Lawrence (with unusual drama), even our own Henry Taylor. But as any stand-up comedian or Sotheby’s own Amy Cappellazzo will tell you—it’s all about timing. Which is why HBO had the good sense to drop Nathaniel Kahn’s The Price of Everything into theaters around the 45th anniversary of the 1973 Scull collection auction, and across its cable platform just before the first major auctions.

The title is a bit of a feint, a distraction from the real action which plays out off-camera (and arguably outside the art world altogether), which is both its attraction and (to a minor extent) disappointment. What saves the film is an awareness of its limitations, a rhythm and pacing reminiscent of documentaries like R.J. Cutler’s The September Issue (2009), which tracked the dynamic yet conflict-riddled editorial process leading up to the publication of the September 2007 edition of Vogue, and some, well, priceless moments that played out the tragicomedy of values under the screened action like a string continuo under a brass choir. It doesn’t exactly end with a bang, but then—see auction results above.

 

Can it really be much of a surprise? The hammer falls, the sales close, and everyone moves on to the next shows, acquisitions, auctions, etc. But as we knew in 2018, the most rational expectation is for the unexpected if not actually catastrophic. The fire THIS time, as James Baldwin might have put it. To his credit, Kahn and most of the major players featured in the film (with the possible exceptions of Jerry Saltz and Jeff Koons) have some idea of where it’s all heading, but continue to perform their roles, not always aware (as in the Wilde play that inspired the title) of the extent to which they embody the dubious values and verities of this world in varying degrees of conflict and alignment.

Paul Schimmel and Gavin Brown actually give voice to this underlying reality, but Kahn is content to leave what Schimmel correctly identifies as a “bubble” floating. Brown in turn sees the “edge” the art world is careening towards (“I can smell the smoke!”), but seems helpless to do anything but drift along with the tide of the commercial cycle. He’s a part of this world, too—with artists of his own to promote and a business to run.

What the film skirts, and is only partially in play in most of the major fall and spring auctions, but can be glimpsed in the film’s interstices and certainly felt throughout, is the real passion animating this commerce: the thrill of the chase. The excess of contemporary commercial culture is sufficiently developed here. What we don’t see is the passion, even obsession, behind the quest to find and possess these objects. But this passion animates collecting at every level of the art market, and not just the upper reaches of the auction market that really take in no more than a few hundred collectors.

This is something that can’t always be quantified or laid out on a spreadsheet (we catch collector and philanthropist Stefan Edlis doing just that at one point in the film)—which is presumably why Kahn turns to former ABC producer and sometime social satirist (The Manny) Holly Peterson, who also happens to be something of a collector. Peterson can see where this crosses over from fashion or mere social status-seeking to serious neurosis. But we don’t need a chart-busting balloon-dog to see that at the upper reaches of this market, this clearly crosses over into something akin to social pathology. Have a look at the sales results from the November contemporary auctions, and you can see that for quite a bit less than $60 to $90 million, you could take home an entire collection of market-approved blue-chip (and some actual first-rate) art.

There’s a certain retail glamour to big art-auction evenings—and they usually are evenings, traditionally in May and November, usually in New York and London. But the glamour lasts about a minute. These are fairly businesslike proceedings and the auctioneers move through the lots briskly. There are big auction dates in other cities, too; but in the art world, these are the most visible, high-profile sales where the most highly valued lots tend to be aggregated, frequently around a major estates liquidation or collector’s de-accessioning, but usually including more than one major slice of what we might call legacy holdings. This is where you find a kernel of truth in Simon de Pury’s simultaneously grand and crass summation, “It’s very important for good art to be expensive.”

The distinction we might draw is durational: before mid-20th century, the works of art that changed hands at these stratospheric levels were not only masterpieces but held over a span of one or more generations. The overheated and inflated postwar and contemporary art-auction market has completely distorted otherwise rational economics. Now the lot considered for sale may have been held only a few years. It may or may not be about a collection or collecting—or even flipping. The seller may simply be cashing out, entirely disengaging from the market or re-entering it at another level. What we increasingly see now is something more on the order of a NASDAQ for, let’s say, recent public offerings, as opposed to holdings—with fashion and sheer speculation taking the place of substantive criteria.

One of the treasures of the Kahn documentary is the archival footage of the October 1973 auction of the Scull collection of late 1950s abstraction, Pop and Minimalist art. It’s a vivid slice of Manhattan social as well as art history—the “Scene” moved uptown. But the 1973 Scull auction did not by itself trigger the escalating speculation in the contemporary art market that followed; and as usual, there’s a back story: the Sculls’ marriage was on the rocks. Within a year, Ethel filed for divorce (a story all by itself).

 

The thrill of the chase is still there—just ask Sotheby’s Executive Vice President and Contemporary Art Chairman, Amy Cappellazzo, whose brand is on abundant (and entertaining) display in the Kahn documentary. But in the late-capitalist auction marketplace, it’s given way to something else. Call it the frenzy to disown, the fear of missing the cultural ‘sell-by’ date. It’s not about the prize, the masterpiece, the collection. It’s about currency—and you can always find a trade war if you want to look for one in that marketplace.

 

“How do you stay sane when your paintings go for a million dollars at auction?” Marilyn Minter asks, half-surprised even to be alive to see it. Kahn’s documentary paints Larry Poons as the artist in voluntary self-exile from the commercial circus of the New York art world, pursuing the elusive grail of his vision. But Minter’s career is far more instructive with respect to the caprices of both commerce and culture. Although Minter’s work has been striking from her earliest, quasi-experimental work, only in 1995 did it begin to reach the platform it long deserved. Poons, by contrast, was immediately successful, debuting at Green Gallery and eventually moving to Castelli; and his comeback has been well underway in this century. As Kahn’s documentary closes, Poons walks uptown from a festive opening at his Manhattan gallery, not incidentally passing a shop window displaying licensed merchandise by Jeff Koons. It’s the slow exhale on the film—and a chapter in the culture of late capitalism spinning out of control in plain view. Kahn’s film puts an ironic lens on what might have been a satyricon of serial excess. But you can’t argue with supply and demand. Or can you? Barbara Rose seems to here. Even Phillips’ Chairman Edward Dolman sounds a cautionary note (en route to a $1 billion year for the house): “[T]here’s a temptation for artists to over-produce.” Although Kahn can’t show us all aspects of even the auction market, between Poons, Minter and several others, he gives us a fair circumnavigation of its northern latitudes from the artist’s viewpoint.

There isn’t a lot Amy Cappellazzo doesn’t know about selling art. Her attitude and approach were well documented in Sarah Thornton’s 2008 trans-sectioning in Seven Days In the Art World. We pick up a few more angles on it as she runs through “comps” with an assistant putting together an auction catalog. But it’s not as if Cappellazzo (or Kahn himself) doesn’t comprehend the larger cultural context and the imponderables concealed within the market calculus. It’s only becoming more complicated as we begin to see works that inhabit the gray zone between object or document and performance entering the market: performance works sold to institutions and in the secondary market, works produced by artificial intelligence.

But the chase only takes you so far. It’s in the enduring proximity afforded by possession where the “grail” mythos (or Pandora’s box) unlocks its secrets. Cappellazzo is not exaggerating when she says “[a] painting like that could change your life—if you let it.” We feel the double freight of that line. It’s the curse of the Hope Diamond magnified into full-scale Shakespearean tragedy. It’s in these moments where we glimpse the more incalculable values prized from the interstices of these transactions. So why not “keep it floating”? It’s the only place we want to live.

It’s an uncharacteristically cool, rainy afternoon when I climb the steps to Judie Bamber’s home and studio in a neighborhood off Sunset. As I enter her studio—a surprisingly spare and self-contained space—a rectangle of golden light seems to float on an easel set up at the rear of the room, seemingly appropriated from some magic hour we’re bound not to see on that particular day. As I move further into the room, I see that it’s a work in progress—with portions of the painting covered around this rectangle, which now discloses an identifiable section of human anatomy.

This is familiar terrain for Bamber—whose work almost always implicates the human body, however abstractly or indirectly—freshly defamiliarized. I’m drawn in, but my intrigue is checked, my reading at best provisional. The section floats, dislocated and slightly decontextualized. Bamber shows me the source for the image—a Playboy centerfold.
This is my first studio visit with the artist, although we’re familiar with each other from gallery openings and art events in Los Angeles. Bamber is relaxed and unassuming—her face framed beneath a soft, shaggy fringe of ash-blond hair, squarish eyeglasses, with a sensual smile that occasionally breaks into a toothy grin—with the casual poise of the teaching artist well-accustomed to introducing and talking about her own work with both collectors and students.

We chat briefly about her appearance a month earlier in a group show at Wilding Cran, where she showed one of the works that are a kind of postscript to the watershed 2011 show of what she now calls her “Mom paintings” (and drawings) at the since-shuttered Angles Gallery, “Are You My Mother?”—a zeitgeist moment at the time, the culmination of a number of bodies of work that seemed to anticipate a full figurative flowering of the ideas and images that had preceded them, and arriving more than six months before Alison Bechdel’s identically titled graphic memoir. We also talk about a series of works that preceded this show which, with the “Mom” paintings, frame a kind of origin story—the series of watercolor paintings from 1995 to 2001, she called simply “Snapshots,” taken from photographs of her father, an amateur artist himself, who introduced Bamber to painting as a child, and who died in an automobile accident when she was just eight years old.

It would be a number of years before Bamber returned purposefully to this trove of photographic material. Her re-approach was less circuitous than a matter of periodic revisit and eventually, through a framework of ideas and strengthening self-awareness, she found what she had been looking for all along. And as we revisit this subject during that January afternoon, I realize this applies to the fragmented image she has just shown me. It’s clearly a fresh departure for her work, yet one which she sees “on the same continuum” with most of her previous work.

There is an aspect of possession or repossession to Bamber’s spatial approach, complicated by both artist’s and viewer’s relation to that space and the image or objects in it and their relation to each other; also the duration of their occupation and observation of those spaces. “Time is important in all of my work, whether it’s placing the image in time to evoke the personal and historical, or if it’s the time contained in the rendering of the image.”

Artist Nayland Blake, an early mentor, drew a contrast between the way “distances were mingled” in the compositional space of the sardonic object and still-life paintings she produced in the mid- to late-1980s, and the durational distance evoked by her melancholy, minimalist 2005 seascapes. Revisiting these very different series in 2018, we’re each struck by different qualities. Bamber makes a note about the “centrality” of her compositions, which triggers paired memories—first, that she may have inherited this compositional bias from her father; also the memory of being scolded by elementary school art instructors for “wasting paper” by centering her subject and leaving so much “empty space.” I am again struck by the contrast between the cool, variably dispassionate and clinical affect of the images, and the sarcasm of the titles; also the extent to which ideas animate her work. It’s difficult not to hear the echo of actual conversations in such titles, but they’re ambiguously placed—from childhood, from adulthood, conversations both intimate and entirely academic; and many of them involve attitudes and approaches toward the body.

Bamber was as influenced as any of her peers by CalArts’ rich history of intergenerational, broadly philosophical feminist dialogue. Given that backdrop, she was all the more perplexed at the simultaneous preoccupation with the body and quasi-puritanical horror at the notion of its pictorial representation as a subject of art that was prevalent around her. “I realized it was a generational thing. But wait a minute—this turns us on. Why can’t we do this? Aren’t we missing something by adhering to that?”

Bamber rebelled discreetly with images of objects and garments in some proximity to the body (e.g., “empty corsets”) without showing the body itself. The paintings that followed carried this dialogue forward into an introspective monologue that placed the formal evolution of her work on a parallel track to her personal evolution. One of the first of these announced (in typically subtle fashion) the direction she would be moving in: Because She is Always Anxiously Awaiting the Onset of Pain (Canned Pea and Bruise) (1986). From there, she moved beyond canned fruits and vegetables to, among others, a June bug, a dead baby finch, an oyster—with titles like, Excuse Me for Living (Spearmint Freshen-up Gum Whole and Squashed) (1988), I Told You So (Vitamin E Capsule, Whole, Squashed, Reinflated) (1988) and (for the finch), I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (Dead Baby Finch) (1990); then later to sex toys: a Ben-Wah ball is titled, Well it Didn’t Just Get Up and Walk Away (Ben-Wah Ball) (1989).

Given the fragility and limited shelf-life of some of her still-life subjects, photography had become an important tool for Bamber. It was also becoming a significant element in her ongoing consideration of the cultural biases implicit to the medium, its potential affect, the viewer’s gaze and its relation to spatial abstraction.

It occurs to me that some of the titles take on a slightly confrontational edge: Someone’s Going to Get Hurt Here and It’s Not Going to Be Me (Marshmallow) (1988). The spatial isolation and rigorous centrality of the composition reinforce this affect. It was around this time, Bamber found herself ready to move on from still life to portraiture—after a fashion.

“The vagina paintings were a start—doing everything wrong by using the female body and fragmenting it. I had this realization that I could be fairly confrontational. But the fear was about being a bad feminist.” She had experimented early in her career with breasts, somewhat on the order of her object paintings. But “these vaginas belonged to actual people.” The three vaginas were painted to be just slightly larger than life on wood panels—to be viewed just as they would be in life. The photographs she referred to presented further complications. “There are things in each of them you can’t really identify because the photograph abstracts them.”

“The hyper-realist vaginas are simply among the great feminist works,” comments art historian, writer and critic, Amelia Jones—“among the most trenchant, beautifully painted, and conceptually rigorous works being done [in the 1990s] period.

“[They] throw back at the viewer precisely what Western fetishism seeks to disavow and delay (the desired yet feared female sex) …challenging not just sexual fetishism, but commodity and photographic fetishism, as well as proving a locus for potentially queer feminist/female desires.”

Bamber was soon to be challenging that fetishism as daringly with lurid images of Lizzie Borden’s murdered parents, in a palette intended to resemble dried menstrual blood (which she originally tried to execute on panties).

It was at about this point, or at least by the late 1990s, that Bamber was again considering the photographs she had revisited periodically since childhood. Encountering Bamber’s work for the first time at the time I did, I had the sense that she was constructing a kind of first-person narrative in this work, but our subsequent conversations correct and complicate this view considerably. To begin with, family photographs, however casual, can never simply be tools. In the “Snapshots,” series, the coloristic quality of the photograph is itself considered—an almost meditative aspect that is not accidental. Nor was it mere coincidence that she had been reading Roland Barthes’ own meditation on photography, Camera Lucida. I had asked her about the dates and times in the titles of the individual paintings. “I think that mattered to me because I wanted to connect to Barthes’ ideas about the photograph always being a representation of death and the Walter Benjamin quote, ‘A man who died at the age of 30 would be forever after regarded as a man who, at whatever stage of his life, would die at 30.’” (Bamber’s father died at 31.) Bamber characterized the transformation from “snapshot” to finished painting as simultaneously “seance and exorcism.” As a narrative, “it would be the fantasy of finding something in the photograph that can no longer be found. I remember painting his hand and having a kind of sense memory.

“In both the ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ work, there’s a piece about giving him a life he didn’t have, placing him in a way he otherwise wouldn’t be known in the world.”
The evolving spatial and temporal dimensions of Bamber’s work come into sharper focus here. Risking the conceptual elegance of her earlier work, the formal complexity of Bamber’s work begins to be matched by a level of psychological complexity. That would include the deceptively “minimalist” seascapes she executed plein air in watercolor before transposing them into oil on canvas. It was not long after completing this series that Bamber found her way back to the figure in full—again by way of family photographs, but more specifically photographs of her mother that, by design, carried a certain charge. Most (though not all) of the photographs that led to Bamber’s “Mom paintings” were deliberately posed and taken by her father. Several were intentionally erotic, but more often they were posed with a view to her mother’s aspirations to become a model. (She would eventually become a hair model.) The photographs encompass an astonishing range of poses, attitudes, viewpoints and spatial perspectives, and moods—and the drawings and paintings Bamber made of them deepen that range still further.

There’s also a kind of parallel reenactment in Bamber’s transposition. She captures the tension between her mother’s engagement and deflection in the photographs. “She’s completely ignoring the person who’s capturing the image,” Bamber says. “She’s absorbed in what she’s doing.”

The quality of the moment, evoked not merely in the details, but the light and deepened contours, is almost palpable in some of these drawings. A few reach back to still older traditions of portraiture—ambiguously pitched between her father’s original styling and Bamber’s own rendering in graphite. But Bamber’s own claim on this moment, and her disruption of its ostensibly hetero-normative domain, is clear. At one point, Bamber interjects her own gloss of its “Freudian aspect” as something “like the primal scene and the desire to interrupt that and put yourself between the mother and the father—and having her to myself.”

Two months later, on a chilly March evening, I am again in Bamber’s Silver Lake studio, gazing at the same painting (now titled) that greeted me on my first visit. Its seductions are magnified in proportion to its finished dimensions. So is its abstraction. Of interest to both of us is the extent to which the focal point shifts away from the figure and into passages that are almost unidentifiable. Again we’re confronted with the pre-existing abstraction of the photograph’s limited depth and its further abstraction here into something lushly chromatic and sensual without reference to the torso in close proximity. Bamber has taken liberties with contours and color intensity, but that can’t entirely explain “where the focus falls.”

“For me what’s most important about the work is what the image refers to in the world, the way it’s chosen, and the way its rendering comes together. That’s always the place I’m trying to get something to happen.”

Our gaze at this point might simply evaporate from the luminescent upper quadrant of the painting. We’ve come full circle to that barely-there punctum—that evanescent bruise in the interrupted narrative of the “princess and the pea.” It’s breaking the spell of “origin” narratives and moving on to what for the moment we may have no words to identify.

Images courtesy of the artist and Gavlak Los Angeles