Artillery Magazine

Month: January 2016

  • Various Small Fairs – Art Los Angeles Contemporary, 2016

    Various Small Fairs – Art Los Angeles Contemporary, 2016

    I think we can all agree that there are too many art fairs. We could almost stretch that to say there are too many fairs, period. We generate too many products – most of them of an astonishingly brief life-span, and worth still less of anyone’s attention; and consume far too many of them, wasting an unacceptable amount of time, energy and resources in the process, and generating an unacceptable amount of waste. Art fairs might just be the hallmark of waning western civilization – the sunset of this geologic age as we head into the full-on Anthropocene. We certainly don’t need most of this stuff.

    But, as Lear in his pathetic wisdom might put it, ‘reason not the need.’ It’s what we want and richly deserve. The closer you are to the art world, the more intensely you feel it (and, when you get right down to it, the players who are really moving the stuff rarely show up at any fair outside Basel; the artists actually making it will likely skip the openings). We pout and kvetch, complain about the shlep and that we have nothing to wear. And then we go. And it’s Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion all over again. I mean ArtForum. I mean – was that so bad?   

    It seems almost churlish to complain – especially considering this blog was partially instigated by an art fair. (There were other factors considered – and the instigating fair was not Art Basel, or even Art Basel Miami Beach; but that’s more or less the gist of it.) And there’s always something to see – even if it’s only ‘where they are now,’ as we observe galleries appearing and dropping off the roster of exhibitors, artists moving in new directions and shifting gallery allegiances, or new and old faces in the roundelay of gallery directors and personnel. But it’s not just ‘they’; there’s always someone new; and once in a while, a real discovery. (I first encountered Julian Hoeber’s work at a fair – Blum & Poe made a showcase for him in their fair space – and it was a break-out, revelatory moment. And the beat goes on: Hoeber’s Paris gallery, Praz-Delavallade was represented here, with what appeared to be a showcase of another L.A. artist, Matthew Chambers – less revelatory, but another unpredictable turn for the artist, with what looked like abstracted, appropriated imagery, rendered in something that looked like sprayed felt. (I always wonder how toxic some of these materials are.) I had my eye out for Matthew Brandt; but notwithstanding what was out or what I might have missed, René-Julien Praz (who was there), and his partner, Bruno Delavallade, clearly have an eye for L.A. artists. (They represent, among others, Ry Rocklen, Amanda Ross-Ho,and Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber.)

    Obviously what draws us to fairs is a compulsive appetite for the new; and ALAC is no conception; but rediscovering the old – whether as an old forgotten friend or something seen fresh in a radically morphed context can amount to almost the same thing. I didn’t need to look at any Warhols; but I enjoyed coming upon an Alan Saret chartreuse ‘cloud’ floating above the Alden Projects space. My companion for the evening was complaining about seeing “the same old shit,” throughout the spaces, whether local or national and international; but you don’t really go to these things expecting a paradigm shift or to radically reshape one’s entire perspective on contemporary art or the art market.

    It’s also great to see some of our local galleries (and it’s hard to reach all of them regularly) shining with their best. I hadn’t been to 1301PE for quite a while (just one of those things…); and their selection reminded me just how essential they are. There was a marvelous Pae White fabric hanging (EVAL 2) glistening with bronze and gold that made me think of a mad collision between the LeBrun/Gobelins tapestries of The Getty’s Woven Gold Louis XIV-era exhibition and Mies van der Rohe. Ana Prvacki’s Music Stand was silent but wickedly expressive – genius. Speaking of fabric, Channing Hansen showed a more structured knit ‘painting’ (in black-and-white) at Marc Selwyn. And am I just regressing into a moment of Paco Rabanne nostalgia, or was I alone in developing a crush on the Rosha Yaghmai hanging of tinted eyeglass lenses and an electric storm resin-fiberglass unfurled ‘awning’ exhibited at Kayne Griffin Corcoran. I’m mad for the merest suggestion of windswept winter and waterscapes; and, alongside some classic John Divola photographs, Gallery Luisotti showed an amazing multi-processed multiple-exposure inkjet print by a CJ Heyliger – a real discovery. Julia Haft Candell showed some cunning ceramic work at The Pit, an off-the-beaten track gallery in Glendale – which was a discovery in itself.

    It’s also wonderful to see work from the art world well off the ‘beaten path’ in the global sense. I’m talking about the Southern Hemisphere. Obviously there’s a lot of art coming out of Sydney, Melbourne and Victoria – but how much of it do we actually get to see outside of London and New York (at, uh, fairs)? Probably my own damned fault for being so obsessed with the Australian Open and the survival of the Great Barrier Reef. But the Sutton Gallery showed some brilliant work in clay by Matt Hinkley and some Jet Stream visionary graphic and mixed media sculptural work by another artist I’d never heard of – George Egerton-Warburton. You could hear the wind whistling through the eucalyptus stands – and I drifted out to the night with that wind in my ears. Or was it the smoke machines in front of the entrance? We have a couple more days to figure it out.

  • Love Potions

    Love Potions

    “Love Potions” at Maloney Fine Art is a wonderfully subtle and wistful exhibition of works by three Los Angeles artists. Kim McCarty, Roger Herman and Mona Kuhn have created a mélange of ceramics, watercolors and photographs that play off each other, creating tangential relationships between the discreet works wherein the female forms in Herman’s vessels, all of whom appear to be in some state of physical ecstasy echoes McCarty’s beautifully enigmatic watercolors, specifically the luminous Double Portrait, 2015, where two faces float side by side like strangely misbegotten twins.

    Love Potions

    Maloney Fine Art

    2680 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034

    Show runs through February 20, 2016

  • The Man Who Fell to Earth (Part 3 of 3)

    The Man Who Fell to Earth (Part 3 of 3)

    “We like dancing and we look divine.”

    David Bowie, “Rebel Rebel”

    from Diamond Dogs, 1974

    Finally – Bowie. Forever Bowie. “Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep….” I want to quote Mick Jagger (to be very specific about it) quoting Shelley (from Adonais – Shelley’s own elegy to Keats) – as he did (in exactly this stanza) in a 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Hyde Park only days after the death of erstwhile bandmate (but really part of its soul), Brian Jones. After all the tributes, eulogies, remembrances, anecdotes, what is left to say?

    As the shock was just setting in (and this was before I’d even given in to my beast of a cold and gone to bed in a big way), I was thinking about how well the amazing Victoria and Albert Museum show, David Bowie Is, had summed up Bowie’s influence across the full spectrum of art and culture. He simply is – no receding into a past tense for him – and is so many different things, impossible to pin down in any definitive way – musically, theatrically, artistically, culturally, politically, sexually, sartorially, stylistically.  

    It was a comfort that the local public and college radio stations were playing Bowie constantly through the week, as I shivered in my sickbed – sparing me any need to hunt for my Bowie CDs (which now seemed sparse – given that I’d sold or given away my vinyl copies of Young Americans, Station to Station, Low, Heroes and Lodger). All those lyrics tailor-made for feverish chill moments: “Look out you rock ‘n’ rollers … pretty soon now, you’re gonna grow older.” “Do you remember the bills you have to pay … for even yesterday?”  

    I remember hearing “Space Oddity” for the first time and exactly where I was when I heard it (a junior-wear department in a Bullock’s department store in 1969) – though I would have no idea who was actually singing it until almost three full years later. That voice – with its distinctive wobble and catch and the barest hint of glossed-over east London – was easily recognizable as the same voice singing “The Man Who Sold the World” and “Changes,” which was already becoming something of an anthem. It was only then that I acquired my first Bowie album, Hunky Dory. Dylan (and Warhol) were already icons – and the hard blues Brit-rock that was an early music touchstone had reached a kind of climax in that year and begun to explode in new directions. The most interesting pop music was diversifying and critically evolving. We’d already seen movement in these directions on our own shores – by way of the Velvet Underground (no small coincidence that Lou Reed’s first solo outing, Transformer, was produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson), various folk-influenced rockers, and a smattering of L.A. and California bands. In the meantime (inspired by Rolling Stone?), Warhol had himself launched Interview. The worlds of pop, art music, movies and fashion were beginning to converge. In other words, I was just catching up. And then Ziggy Stardust landed in America. The rest, as they say, is the history of the world long after we’ve left the planet.

    It’s been interesting to observe the enormous response we’ve seen in the art world – certainly here in Los Angeles. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any fine artists acknowledging his influence on their work – it’s funny how a resistance to acknowledging a pop/mass cultural influence persists among so many avant-garde artists even as the divide between pop/mass and high art domains has blurred if not dissolved altogether; yet the influence, however subtle or indirect, is there. (The distrust was, of course – as Bowie himself would have pointed out – mutual.) The response to his passing from the world of fashion and design was, as expected, almost universal. Bowie’s influence on the fashion world was immediate (consider my own first encounter) and more or less continuous over more than four decades. (Jean-Paul Gaultier reached back to Bowie’s Ziggy incarnation in a collection only a couple of years ago.) But Bowie’s influence on fashion was merely the by-product of a project that was much larger and more personal. Fashion ‘got’ him first (alongside music) because fashion went global long before the art world. (It also had something to do with what was happening in both art and fashion, as well as music, in London in the 1960s.) But Bowie was never a creature of fashion (though he understood its uses) or even, notwithstanding his beauty and innate elegance, a style icon in the conventional sense.

    “Elegance is refusal,” Diana Vreeland once famously said – and Bowie was certainly about that. He refused to be boxed in – to be classed (up or down), classified or categorized – musically, artistically, theatrically, sexually, politically. He was a product of his time without being constrained by it. The glitter- and glam-rock of the early 1970s was simply a logical outgrowth of something that had been going on since David Jones left art school (he also studied dance and theatre – and no small coincidence that so many rockers of that period emerged from the same art schools). That time – the late 1960s and early 1970s – was a time of pose and performance, which is not to say it was merely about artifice or fashion silhouette. It was about a more fundamental shift in consciousness and attitudes. Technology and the sexual revolution naturally played into this shift. Bowie said once in an interview (with Terry Gross on her WHYY program, Fresh Air) that his original notion was to write musicals in a rock idiom – and it sort of makes sense. He’d come out of all of that – art school, dance, the music hall and theatrical pantos, alongside jazz and rock‘n’roll. But he would have to come up with something new: Sandy Wilson had already written The Boy Friend (and Ken Russell made the film – as he would later make a film of The Who’s rock/concept musical Tommy). Besides Ken Russell, there was Nicolas Roeg, who, with Donald Cammell, had turned an entire film around motives of pose, posture (and imposture), and performance – and a vehicle for Mick Jagger – Performance. (Not so coincidentally, the dress Bowie wears on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World was designed by the same Savile Row hipster who had designed the white tunic-dress Jagger wore to that aforementioned Hyde Park concert in 1969 – Michael – sometimes known simply as “Mr.” Fish.) His approach was really something adapted from art school – cross-media and cross-disciplinary, a kind of musical bricolage (albeit with polished production values). It could be raw or minimal, futuristic or simply atmospheric, theatrical or simply danceable. Bowie embraced and embodied the blur.

    He also embraced an art of contingency and collaboration. One musical identity – even his own permutations – wasn’t enough for him; hence his collaborations: with Mick Ronson, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Freddie Mercury, Trent Reznor; and on and on. Aside from Iggy and Ronson, if there was a musical contemporary who resembled him, it might have been – for all their differences in styles and sensibility – Frank Zappa, another musician who could never be boxed in.

    Which is why the man who played The Man Who Fell to Earth and left the planet (in such ironically timely fashion) as it began its transition to a place not unlike the doomed planet in that film, is and will be probably up to the day we’re finally compelled to leave it.

  • “Some Make You Sing….” (Part 2 of 3)

    “Some Make You Sing….” (Part 2 of 3)

    Something kind of hit me today

    I looked at you and wondered if you saw things my way

    . . .    

    We’re taking it hard all the time

    Why don’t we pass it by?

     

    David Bowie, “We Are the Dead”

    from Diamond Dogs, 1974

     

    The first part of this post promised a superfecta; and I’m not sure it’s possible to live up to that, if for no other reason than simply the difficulty of making any kind of conclusive judgment on the kinds of shows I’m looking at in the space of a few hours spread out over 30 square miles. Sure, there are a few (e.g., the shows already covered in the first part of this post) – and even there, it would be absurd to say that my opinion might not be revised over repeated viewings. This is why we revisit shows in the first place. Or why we return frequently to favorite works in museums. Our first impressions are never our last; we bring something fresh to each viewing and take away something new.

    Which is why I’ll be going back – not just to the shows I’m about to mention, but to the shows covered in (and some of those omitted from) the last post. I wanted to linger at George Legrady’s show at Edward Cella; and certainly his multi-layered, multi-faceted lenticular panels invited it; but couldn’t have spent more than 15 minutes with them. Memory is mined and manipulated in Legrady’s work, no less than Barnette’s, and far more explicitly. It also moves in both actual and remembered space and time for both the viewer and (presumably) the artist himself – which apparently related directly to the two-channel interactive animation piece   Legrady is fascinated by the collage/montage of time and memory; the contemporary (or simply invented) foreground and (remembered or recovered) background of memory.  The groundwork for the work was apparently laid with the discovery of a collection of family photographs taken mostly in eastern Europe (between Hungary, Romania and Transylvnia); and the lenticular work here apparently draws from photos of a Transylvanian picnic outing. You can see immediately how the lenticular work might lead to animation studies. The lenticular prints have their own quality of animation (albeit partially supplied by the viewer), but more important is the inherent fascination of the underlying photographic material and the overlaid imagery. I had to wonder how the animation would amplify that experience.

    As I occasionally do in these instances, I had a look at the press release which set out Legrady’s aims more or less straightforwardly; also noting his “contributions to the computational arts,” which sounded like something more applicable to tax accounting – but maybe there’s a layer I’m missing.

    It made for a striking transition to go from Chris Ballantyne’s show at Zevitas Marcus (next door to Edward Cella) that pursued a number of architectural and geometric themes and motives (and natural, too) to Toba Khedoori, whose past work has exploited both architectural and natural motives in her draughtsman-like explorations of existential and quasi-serialist geometries, at Regen Projects. Settting aside one striped painting that seemed almost literally a serialist work, it was quite different from what I expected. Here, only two paintings – seemingly tilted, eliding views of polished ceramic tiling more or less filling their respective canvases, one presented more frontally than its angled mate, bore distinct relation to that past work. Here, even meticulously rendered branches and leaves (in a completely white space) seemed well removed and on another plane completely from even previous naturalistic studies. Rather, the emphasis seemed to be a Fontana-esque contrast between the delineated plane and the absolute void – physicality and nullity.

    From this kind of ‘naturalistic’ yet slightly ethereal art concrète, it was not much of a leap to the equally ethereal yet silken domain of Lita Albuquerque, at the Kohn Gallery. Albuquerque is well known for (frequently site-specific) work that bears on the body’s relationship to both the earth and cosmos; and surrounded by gold and silver discs in the main gallery, each inset within dense fields of rich, vibratile color that evoked both terrestrial and celestial qualities – purples both boreal and nebular, luminous sapphire blues that were both atmospheric and referenced the cosmic infinitude – the viewer felt suspended in a lunar ceremony. The jewel-like intensity of the color owes something to Japanese Enogu technique (or so the press release informed us – with the colors laid over layers of black and white); which may have something to do with the ceremonial aspect of the show. It was impossible not to be reminded of Japanese screen and silk painting.

    :  :  :

    That little ellipsis marks the approximate moment I broke off to surrender to the viral mischief that had besieged me. Part 1 went up without too many digital hitches – along with a nod to Bowie, whose funeral pall I was involuntarily sharing in body as well as spirit, as I succumbed to what felt like a not-so-mild bout of bubonic plague. That week-end was as notable sonically as it was visually; though, as with the George Legrady lenticulars, everything seemed strewn beneath leaves, branches, lakes and forest thickets. Even before the evening’s openings, I had the great fortune of hearing most of the Met broadcast of the closing performance of this season’s (David McVicar) production of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena – and possibly one of the greatest performances of the title role I’ve ever heard. In Sondra Radvanovsky’s performance, the dazzling vocal pyrotechnics (the role has an intimidating range from lowest to highest register) were matched by an incomparably supple and dramatically insightful handling of the role’s emotional complexity. Donizetti’s Bolena is every inch the queen she actually was, but also vulnerable and manifestly conflicted. Radvanovsky gave full scope to that emotional breadth and conflict in a dazzling coloratura performance that seemed to move inexorably from a high-strung regal poise to passion and indignation, from romance and resignation to tragic elegy – eclipsing possibly every other performance I’ve heard in the role, including Beverly Sills. She was well paired with her various foes and foils, including the incomparable Jamie Barton in the role of Giovanna (Jane Seymour), Ildar Abdrazakov as Enrico (Henry VIII) and Stephen Costello. There were so many great moments, I couldn’t begin to enumerate them all; but I will say Radvanovsky’s aria at the close of the first act (paralleling Abdrazakov’s responsive aria) was ineffably heart-rending.

    I guess some people would say I was ready to get carried away on the first horse I mounted. But there’s really nothing quite as moving as the human voice. The following day, Emmanuel Ax brought an equally, agelessly supple technique back to Disney Hall for a performance of the Franck Symphonic Variations with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (The Chopin C# minor nocturne he encored with wasn’t bad either.) The Pierre Boulez Mémoriale for flute and octet had actually been my selected ‘A’ side for the afternoon. Its timing – only days after Boulez’s death at 90 in Baden-Baden – was purely coincidental; but its original spirit made an appropriate memorial to its composer – and the soloist, Denis Bouriakov, and guest conductor Daniel Harding captured that spirit beautifully. Another uncanny coincidence was Harding’s expressive and slightly ‘contrapuntal’ conducting style – strikingly reminiscent of Boulez’s own distinctive ‘contrapuntal’ conducting style, though, unlike Boulez, Harding used a baton through all but the Mémoriale. Hard to say what Boulez would have made of the unbridled lyric romanticism of Schumann’s 2nd C major Symphony; but Harding and the Phil made something gorgeously soaring of it. The third movement C minor Adagio was possibly the most beautiful rendition of that movement I’ve ever heard.

    Finally – Bowie….  [Continued Part 3]

  • Rosette

    Rosette

    Mary Anna Pomonis has curated a thoughtful and nuanced exhibition entitled Rosette in the project space at Charlie James Gallery. Working with the central idea of the constructed image of a rose with all its itinerant histories and meanings, etc. the works in this exhibition, which include Mark Dutcher’s lovely albeit sorrowful rosebush made of colored wax and Sabina Ott’s Mater Rosa I from a series of lithographs that depict the rose as a strangely regressive shape, mirroring the circle, in some way echo both the fragility and decadence of the rose as a central and narrative trope in our ever-shifting human history.

     

    Rosette
    Charlie James Gallery
    969 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012

    Show runs through February 20, 2016

  • Andy Robert @Full Haus/Los Angeles

    Andy Robert @Full Haus/Los Angeles

    A slate of concrete with blue Skittles scattered across it is illuminated by a clamp light in Full Haus’ current outdoor exhibition: “Andy Robert: Heavy Rain and Lightning.” Titled Dream Deferred (Skittles on Concrete), this simply executed sculpture seems commonplace enough: “‘Skittles and pavement’ were the words circling around me when I was coming to conclusions about the Trayvon Martin case,” explains Robert. “‘What happens to a dream deferred?’” asked Robert, echoing the opening line of Langston Hughes’s poem which is also in the press release for the show. Does it “‘crust and sugar over— / like a syrupy sweet…or does it explode?’”

     

    Dream Deferred (Skittles on Concrete) Concrete, skittles 35 x 35 x 2 inches 2015
    Dream Deferred (Skittles on Concrete)
    Concrete, skittles 35 x 35 x 2 inches 2015, photo by Janna Avner

    Robert’s outdoor sculptures and installations reinforce the disturbing evidence in the Trayvon Martin case by responding to a particular fact: the Skittles and Arizona iced tea Martin had on him (and no weapon) during the time of his shooting. These items, Robert imagines, represent a loss of childlike innocence, social injustice and stunted dreams. Robert’s outdoor sculptures and installations also reveal his burgeoning semiotics as an open system with slippages in meaning.

    When associated with a murder trial gone awry, Dream Deferred opens the viewer to a deadly absent referent (a lost life) and the work’s mundanity becomes an uncomfortable, suffocating silence—one that is associated with the lexicon of our cultural trauma over recent, preventable gun shootings.

     

    Sometimes It Rains Umbrella, fan blades, spray stone, metal 28 x 46 x 27 inches 2014
    Sometimes It Rains
    Umbrella, fan blades, spray stone, metal 28 x 46 x 27 inches
    2014

    After all, how does one memorialize injustice? An article from The Guardian states that Martin’s bag of Skittles remains unopened to this day and should “belong in a museum.” Perhaps this is so, but what if we open this bag, like Robert does, because nothing is ever neatly contained, nor remains immaculate forever? Many believe that the circumstances of Martin’s death reflect a callous disregard for human life, reminding us of the frailty of our mortality while also violating our sense of ethics. Robert’s work captures a nationwide lack of control and confusion that many feel over Martin’s case—and every other recently—that now speckles America’s consciousness as the awful “new normal.”

     

    Andy Robert: Heavy Rain and Lightning

    December 6th – January 31st

    Full Haus

    2042 Griffith Park Blvd

    Los Angeles, CA  90039

    fullhaus.biz/About

     

     

  • Rebecca Campbell: You Are Here

    Rebecca Campbell: You Are Here

    Rebecca Campbell believes in paying it forward as her most recent exhibition entitled You Are Here at LA Louver so elegantly demonstrates. Each of these eighteen portraits represents an image of a woman artist whom Campbell knows and admires, but more importantly perhaps the paintings express a wondrous and mysterious collaborative process between the artist and the sitter. The paintings convey the specificities and nuances of each unique relationship as it unfolds in space and time. There is tremendous dignity expressed in these faces, and one has the keen sense that these images derive from a deep and abiding respect that goes both ways.

    Rebecca Campbell:
    You Are Here
    LA Louver 
    45 N Venice Blvd, Venice, CA 90291

    Show runs through Feb. 13th, 2016

     

     

  • “Fill Your Heart….” (Part 1 of 3)

    “Fill Your Heart….” (Part 1 of 3)

    “If we can sparkle, he may land tonight….”

    David Bowie, “Starman”

    (from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972)

    Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Pony ride, Compton, CA), 2015
    Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Pony ride, Compton, CA), 2015

    Those readers who have followed this blog since it launched in 2007 may recall that it was originally a somewhat diaristic blow-by-blow account of my wanderings through the Los Angeles (and international) art world, with occasional detours into the domains of music, fashion and politics. This post reverts to that form not only because the week-end was more-than-usually eventful, spilling well beyond the round of gallery openings (there were a lot), but because so much of it had a much larger resonance both cultural and personal.

    Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Go Go Go), 2015
    Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Go Go Go), 2015

    I would never trust myself with the knd of wager that is referred to in betting circles as a ‘superfecta,’ – but allow me to wager a ‘win-place-and-show’ bet (with a superfecta honorary fourth) on the week-end’s shows – or at least the ones I was fortunate enough to catch. Sadie Barnette’s strong show at Charlie James took a healthy lead right out of the starting gate – and more or less managed to hold on to it clear to my personal finishing line. I’ll stop beating the horserace analogy right now – but the title and serial motives of the show certainly open the, uh, gate to it. Barnette’s title for the show is Superfecta; and the domain of horse racing figures prominently throughout the work; also the domains of pure chance and specific selection (itself variously the product of conscious analytics, subconscious motive, and sheer whimsy) and their intersections in life, memory, and art. It’s the kind of show where probability and poetry might apply in equal measure.

    Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Racing Form 1), 2015
    Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Racing Form 1), 2015

    A series of untitled pieces in silken graphite with stenciled numbers (1 to 9) alternately blacken the numbers into racing form and newsprint pages, and expose the page within the stenciled outline – including horse names, race results, statistical details, along with the odd detail or horse and jockey. There’s a kind of I Ching magic to the exposed details. Elsewhere, Barnette floats words (like the title, ‘superfecta’) on various surfaces (some backed with colored plexiglas) in works that bear some affinity with Ed Ruscha’s iconic word paintings; but she stays true throughout to an aura of displaced yet tender memories. For those with the time and patience, the group show downstairs, Rosette, curated by Mary Anna Pomonis, is a bonus, featuring some very strong work by artists including Kristin Calabrese, Suzanne Adelman, Sarah Cromarty, Angel Chen and Mark Dutcher.

    At Durden and Ray, Artillery’s own Anne Martens showed some striking wallpaper patterns morphing universal caution and hazard symbols into revolver cylinders in suitably fluorescent secondaries and Crayola red. I had only one question: if ‘obfuscate’ is the lingua franca of public speech, what exactly is really ‘hidden’ or ‘camouflaged’? The agenda? Maybe. We already know the guns are pointed at us. In the meantime, we speak politely and carry a big lawsuit. Martens was wearing a charming novelty chain at the opening with an orange plastic ‘yay’ pendant – smells like teen spirit to me. (Hey – we’re true to our school at Artillery.)

    Steven Hull, All I Want to Do Is Forget, 2014
    Steven Hull, All I Want to Do Is Forget, 2014

    Steven Hull’s and Farrah Karapetian’s work – at Rosamund Felsen and Von Lintel Galleries, respectively – had far greater poignancy. Both touched on themes of the fragile vessel, shifting, unstable horizons, the uncertainty of landfall, of terra not-so-firma – Hull in his signature surreal and emphatically graphic style, with its alternately aggressively masked and abjectly sexual figures intrepid on the voyage out, yet simultaneously suffused with nostalgia; Karapetian in a series of electric (and unique) chromogenic photograms that are her own signature medium.

    Farrah Karapetian, Lifesaver, 2015
    Farrah Karapetian, Lifesaver, 2015

    Although Karapetian references concrete objects (or objectives – the title is Relief) – e.g., lifesavers or lifebuoys, life jackets, bluffs – throughout, the work also alludes abstractly to metamorphosis and transformation. (Two of the titles actually reference the Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2003 collection, Irere, inspired by an Amazonian tale of a girl’s metamorphosis from shipwrecked pirate waif to Amazon princess. I had to wonder if Karapetian had actually been influenced by some of McQueen’s own film projections, as well as the John Maybury film that introduced the défilé.) And then there was an installation piece Clear – the aforementioned life jacket in pieces on what might have been a piece of beach carved out and installed in the gallery – that seemed to anchor that vision and ambition. (Irere is also a species of duck, don’t ya know.) ‘Nothing … that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange,’ – something more or less guaranteed in a Karapetian work, and no less so here in this churning, galvanic show.

  • David Bowie: Ashes to Ashes

    David Bowie: Ashes to Ashes

    David Bowie released his envoi-like album, Blackstar, on his birthday, and so a lightness of being seems to shine through his final week on earth. His lightness might be his general M.O., considering he made pop music out of lyrics about “sailors fighting in a dance hall,” and  issues about self-evolution in his song, Changes, which celebrates changes that apparently aren’t always “so sweet.” 

    Mick Rock
    David Bowie, Photo: Mick Rock

    Bowie was an enigma and force of nature in his ability to churn out hits garnering millions of world-wide, die-hard fans. As a glam-rock star, Bowie sought new interpretations of what personal and public identity could be. His mischievous and jocular smiles recorded in his live 1972 performance of Starmanindicate a playful, onstage persona. Bowie’s career is comprised of shifting colorations in the various gender-bending outfits he donned, catchy beats, and arcane lyrics, which may reflect Bowie as an artist sensitive to the changing fluxes of culture, politics, social issues, and gender issues.

    Terry O'Neil
    David Bowie, Photo: Terry O’Neil

    Bowie stated in an interview in the documentary, David Bowie Is (2014), that when he was just starting his career, it was easier for him to put on a persona as he performed, rather than be himself. Perhaps he didn’t quite know who he was just then. In the 1950s, Bowie was aping the hackneyed performances of his mentor at the time—an experimental mime. Documentary footage shows a white-faced Bowie prying himself out of an invisible box. 

    Arguably a more successful response to Bowie’s personal ontological questions is his creation of Ziggy Stardust, one of the greatest rock-legend personas in rock history. One might even suggest that his interests in new ontologies, the fragmented self and other alternative self-conceptualizations, stem from the struggle to maintain the singular “I” amongst the challenges of being an artist with a voice as unique as Bowie’s. One wonders if his interpreted persona was a life raft for some sacred idea of the self, which allowed for the dogged perseverance of Bowie’s long, successful career. 

    Lynn Goldsmith
    Ziggy Stardust, Photo: Lynn Goldsmith

    The art of persona is often the art of self-preservation, and Bowie’s art was as much his shield as it was his sword. Tony Visconti, Bowie’s producer, wrote on Facebook that Bowie’s “death was no different from his life—a work of Art.” Bowie’s success reflects in how he was able to transcend human concerns over the confusing plurality of existence, societal pressures, and personal preconceptions. 

  • Chris Kraus Papers Acquired by NYU

    Chris Kraus Papers Acquired by NYU

    New York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections has acquired the papers of writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus, who rose to fame for “I Love Dick” (1997) and “Aliens & Anorexia” (2000), among other written works combining autobiography, theory, and fiction. The acquired materials include her personal diaries, notes, films, videos, and correspondences. 

  • Editor’s Letter

    Editor’s Letter

    Tulsa_portrait_roughDear Readers,

    Film and art just go together. If you’re into art, you’re most likely a film buff (and film snob), and if you’re into film, well… maybe, actually, it doesn’t go the other way around. So let’s stick to the first theory. This is a contemporary art magazine after all.

    We’ve had a film issue before, but this one is a bit different. We’re covering all types of moving pictures, including television and video art. Television is the newest addition to our always eclectic lineup. If you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of great TV these days, and most of it is not on the Network as we formerly knew it. The Internet is quickly outdating television; but as long as it’s still around, one of the most interesting and creative series today is Louie, by comedian Louis CK, on the FX network. Besides being howlingly hilarious and jaw-dropping DID I JUST SEE WHAT I JUST SAW?—it’s sobering, smart, dark and creative—and I mean creative in an artistic sense. His material feels uniquely personal and he is constantly innovative in the way he tells stories. When I watch Louie, I’m always amazed, and think to myself, this guy is truly an artist. He sees and thinks like an artist.

    So when contributor Elwyn Palmerton pitched Louie as a topic to write about, I was delighted. In my opinion Louis CK is an artist. Which brings me back to film and art. When I was an undergrad, that’s when I got introduced to underground films—that’s what they used to call any “arty” type film back then. Every Friday night was underground film night at the University of Arkansas. I saw all the Warhol films, and that’s when I saw A Clockwork Orange, Rollerball and Inserts.

    My next academic stop was Tulsa University, and there I was exposed to a plethora of underground films. Every spring they had the “Subversive Film Festival.” The main guy that ran the festival was pumped up on amphetamines for the entire 36-hour film run. They would start Friday night, maybe with a campy porn, like Deep Throat. (That’s the first time I saw a hairy vagina fill an entire movie screen: some of the audience members actually screamed! I distinctly recall the screams coming from the females, which I thought kind of weird as, well, that’s sort of like looking in the mirror isn’t it?). Then all the South American films would pile up, then perhaps the most rare of John Waters’ films like Eat Your Makeup or Multiple Maniacs.

    Watching those movies—seeing those directors and actors push boundaries and follow their vision—felt like it was part of the process of becoming an artist. That’s what artists do when they’re not making art; they’re watching arty films or reading literature—or reading about art! So, my Dear Readers, we thought you’d enjoy this issue of arty film, TV and video. Louie just fits into the underground film category in my mind, even though it’s on television. But, hell, all the stuff that’s mainstream now was subversive in my day. That’s when men were men and vaginas had hair! Happy New Year!

     

  • Art, Lies and Film Docs

    Art, Lies and Film Docs

    Not all films about artists and the art world are silly, but most of them are. To paraphrase a Mark Twain quote, “There are lies, damned lies, and films about artists and the art world.”  (Twain linked “statistics” with lies and damned lies.) From such films as the Vincent van Gogh epic Lust for Life (1956) to the Michelangelo biopic The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), we get overripe portrayals of the tortured soul, whose genius outshines that of ordinary humans—but the title of the latter film says it all: they’re tortured, but they’re ecstatic in their artistic being.

    Kirk Douglas as van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956).
    Kirk Douglas as van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956).

    The tendency of Hollywood to over-romanticize is common, especially when it comes to “Great Men.” You name it, Great Men of the Arts, Great Men of Politics, Great Men of Science, etc., with an occasional—very occasional—nod to the Great Women. Even recent films seem to fall into that crevasse. I enjoyed Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat (1996) which boasts a remarkable performance by Jeffrey Wright in the title role and seems fairly evenhanded in its impressionistic portrait of the New York art world. However, recently, I read a biting critique by curator Okwui Enwezor in Frieze magazine. He pointed out that Schnabel put himself in the film as Albert Milo (Gary Oldman), and Milo, a white artist, achieves the fame plus the success and security that Basquiat, as an African American artist, did not. Enwezor also pointed out that “Milo” repainted Basquiat’s work, which is a lie.

     

    David Bowie as Andy Warhol and Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat in Basquiat, (1996).
    Basquiat, 1996, Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat, and David Bowie as Andy Warhol.

    Perhaps we might be able to rely on documentaries to give us truer portraits—after all, usually the subject’s actual image and voice are used. “There’s nothing more powerful than when you have someone’s real voice telling the story,” says Lisa Immordino Vreeland, whose lively new documentary, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, has just been released. Recently, we’ve also seen Hockney directed by Randall Wright, which utilizes interviews with David Hockney and those who knew him. Both Vreeland and Wright are veteran documentary filmmakers, although Wright, with his experience making BBC docs, tends to have a straightforward style, while Vreeland intersperses some jazzy special effects, graphics and editing into hers.

     

    David Hockney in Hockney (2015)
    David Hockney in Hockney (2015)

    Wright had previously made David Hockney: Secret Knowledge (2003), which traced Hockney’s theory that artists were using optics in their work as early as the 15th- century. The first part of his new doc, Hockney, is fun, even joyous, as Hockney escapes his humble middle class background in gray, glum Bradford, England, by going to art school—the Bradford College of Art, then the Royal College of Art in London—and eventually to America. He first landed in New York, then visited California, and fell in love with Los Angeles for the light and the handsome boys. The film looks at his unending reinvention and fascination with new media—he’s worked with photo-collage using Polaroids, and he’s made videos with multiple cameras running simultaneously—although recently he has returned to watercolor and painting.

    David Hockney in vintage photographs from Hockney.
    David Hockney in vintage photographs from Hockney.

    One of the strengths of the film is that it liberally mixes Hockney’s art throughout, so that we get to see the people and places that mattered to him at different times in his life. Wright also had access to Hockney’s personal video collection and to his family, so we get some intimate glimpses through clips and interviews. However, the film seems far more interested in his early life, when his career was taking off, than recent decades which are skipped through quickly.

     

    David Hockney, Peter Getting out of Nick's Pool (1966).
    David Hockney, Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966).

    Take how the doc covers Hockney’s love affair with Peter Schlesinger, an art student he met while teaching at UCLA in 1966. Schlesinger became the subject of numerous drawings and paintings, including the famous 1966 painting, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. When the affair ended, Hockney was devastated. That break up was captured by a 1975 quasi-doc by Jack Hazan, A Bigger Splash, a film which apparently sent Hockney into depression, and which he tried to buy out. It’s curious that Hockney doesn’t cover Hockney’s romantic life of recent decades. He was in a 24-year relationship with John Fitzherbert, which ended in 2009, as reported in The Guardian in 2013. But maybe Hockney had learned his lesson from A Bigger Splash and didn’t want to mention it, especially as Fitzherbert later got involved with his studio assistant, who died in 2013 after a drug binge, topped off by drinking drain cleaner.

     

    Peggy Guggenheim, Courtesy of the Peggy Guggenheim
    Peggy Guggenheim, Courtesy of the Peggy Guggenheim

    This is an affectionate, guarded portrait, while Vreeland’s Peggy Guggenheim is a warts-and-all exposé about a woman who lived large and, as art collector and art dealer, was central to defining the art of the 20th century. The core of the documentary is an audio interview, a tape recording from Guggenheim’s last interview with her biographer, Jacqueline Bograd Weld, in the late 1970s. “You’ve often thought your greatest achievement was the discovery of Pollock?” you hear Weld ask. “Yeah, I think so.” Her collection? “My second achievement.”

     

    Peggy Guggenheim, Courtesy of the Peggy Guggenheim
    Peggy Guggenheim, Courtesy of the Peggy Guggenheim

    Raised in an upper class New York City family, Guggenheim grew up a rebel. She was naturally drawn to artists and the avant-garde, partly to spite her family, partly to establish a unique identity for herself, and partly, I think, because it was a blast. At 21, when her father died on the Titanic, Guggenheim inherited a fortune and decamped to Europe in 1920. In 1941 she returned to the U.S. and set up The Art of This Century Gallery in New York City, which was part commercial gallery and part museum. She gave first exhibitions to Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell and Clyfford Still. She characterizes herself succinctly, “I was the midwife.” 

     

    Peggy Guggenheim, Courtesy of the Peggy Guggenheim
    Peggy Guggenheim, Courtesy of the Peggy Guggenheim

    The film is a portrait of a woman who was ahead of her time, and she is remarkably candid and clear about her life. She went through affairs with a string of men, some of whom took advantage of her, even beat her up. Her second husband Max Ernst comes off as a stereotypical artist with an overweening male ego. Once, when she bought herself a fur coat, he got so jealous that she had to buy him one, too. After World War II ended and she divorced Ernst, she decamped to Venice, Italy, a city which matched her flamboyance and appreciated her eccentricities. Her former home is now a museum of the art she collected, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which is delightful and mesmerizing for the strength of its personal vision. During her lifetime, she had also given a great deal of art away—20 Jackson Pollocks by her estimation, a most generous gift.

    It seems to me that we get a better sense of Peggy Guggenheim after seeing this doc than of David Hockney after seeing Hockney. Despite having such a public presence in the art world, and even courting attention through lectures, publications and films, Hockney seems essentially a private person. He is also still living, so biographers need to tred gingerly.

  • Louis CK: Comedian cum Auteur

    Louis CK: Comedian cum Auteur

    In an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Louis CK takes Seinfeld out on his boat on the Hudson River. Looking across the water and admiring the skyline, Louis says, “New York makes me crazy. I love New York City. I love the different brick colors and the water towers.” It is a telling observation for the most part because it is not funny nor is it meant to be. It serves as a reminder that not everything that Louis CK is up to in his eponymously titled FX series is about merely getting laughs.

    This relatively offhand comment—shoehorned between a couple of much funnier anecdotes—also gets at the things that make Louie, the TV show, great. It alludes to CK’s generally uncanny ability to capture a sense of place that is directly linked to both color (“the different brick colors”) and the psychology of the city’s inhabitants (“New York makes me crazy”). For all the praise heaped upon Louie as a comedian, not enough has been said about his talents as a director, or how the sophisticated visual style of Louie helps to carry the weight of his often thematically complex material.

     

    Scene from Season 4, Episode 8, “Elevator: Part 4,” Louie goes to window in therapy session to let loose a primal scream.
    Scene from Season 4, Episode 8, “Elevator: Part 4,” Louie goes to window in therapy session to let loose a primal scream.

    One scene in Season 4’s Episode 7, “Elevator: Part 4,” epitomizes his sensibility as an auteur. Louie is in couples’ therapy with his ex-wife. The complex psychodynamics of their relationship are being articulated while we also see the bleak, cold and gray cityscape of New York through the office window. In the midst of talking about how their daughters handled the divorce, Louie stands up, walks over and puts his head out of the window to let loose a primal scream. This jarring, surreal moment is a good example of how he uses color—often, specifically, color temperature—and the city itself to express emotional undercurrents in his characters. Here, the shift from inside to the bleak city exterior dramatizes the shift from externalized psychology to the purely internal: the outside is Louie’s inside, emotionally.

    The scene is striking not just for the way that it perfectly captures something about how New York looks and feels in the winter but for how the cityscape itself might become a mirror for our feelings. Like dozens of other moments during the show’s five-season run, it perfectly captures an essence of New York—not a gestalt of the city, per se, but a unique essence: what a specific block or hallway in New York is like at a particular time.

    His choices of interiors and locations may have as much to do with his color sensibility as with narrative choices. Similarly, faces, as he depicts them, often have a uniquely corporeal yet aestheticized quality. He is less inclined to gloss over imperfections in the manner of most commercial television than he is to put flesh generally (often his own) directly under the microscope. By illuminating its flaws and showing people’s faces (wrinkles and all), he can find a kind of beauty usually avoided on television.

     

    Louis CK: Flesh and all
    Louis CK: Flesh and all

    The use of his own relatively unglamorous face is typical of this. Its fleshy, freckled, pink and orange visage is filmed as if it were, itself, an inherently formal or painterly device. His puffy ginger slab of a head is often situated against a particular cast of institutional yellow (a bit drab and often fluorescently, starkly lit). This might be physically unflattering to him, but it is also genuinely exquisite and painterly. One can sense, also, his interest in color as a quality in itself. That is, he uses color to explore the affective possibilities of film rather than film as a way of merely illustrating the colors of things.

    This knack for color and light is epitomized, however, not by any particular color, but what is sometimes described as its absence: a pure velvety darkness from which his figures seem, at times, to emerge—almost as if darkness was a velvety material or matrix which subsumes them. He uses this device frequently, but the most striking instance occurs in Season 5’s episode: “Untitled.” Where Louie has trafficked in dream sequences and often absurdly dreamlike twists on reality in other episodes, this one contains its most extended dream sequence.

     

    Scene from Season 5, Episode 5: “Untitled,” Louie’s nightmares.
    Scene from Season 5, Episode 5: “Untitled,” Louie’s nightmares.

    The episode is structured in a way that it is hard to tell where Louie’s oddball version of “reality” ends and its dream sequence begins. Nevertheless, we are given our first definitely surreal moment when he opens his apartment door upon a fathomless dark void. This darkness is interrupted only when a nearly faceless, tanned, rubbery, figure—a kind of lanky terrifying gremlin—emerges suddenly from it and pounces on Louis. The scene recalls the recent art film, Under the Skin, which theorized darkness as a tangibly goopy material—one from which terrifying figures and nightmarish dreamscapes might emerge.

     

    Louis CK with daughter in market: Louie, Season 5, Episode 5: “Untitled,”
    Louis CK with daughter in market:
    Louie, Season 5, Episode 5: “Untitled,”

    This also calls to mind and, in turn, dramatizes, a line from the Tao Te Ching: “Darkness within darkness/ the gateway to all understanding.” The episode as a whole, also, echoes a Season 2 episode (“Country Drive”) where Louie lectures his two daughters for complaining about being bored: “I’m bored is a useless thing to say. You live in a great big vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless. It goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand?”

    In the end, Louie determines that his nightmares are brought on by a crisis of conscience. Earlier, he had declined to help a woman (his daughter’s friend’s recently divorced mother) move a fish tank. Once he does consent to do this favor, not only do the nightmares end, but he ends up, in a rather comedic aside, vigorously humping the attractive divorcee atop a washing machine.

    Here is the perfect Louie episode. It encapsulates all the ways in which darkness, sex, our moral conscience, comedy, light, terror and the utterly absurd are all intertwined. Here, we might say, Louis is offering a kind of typically profane yet heartfelt advice—a twist on the Tao Te Ching: Know the darkness (comedic, psychological and cinematographic). Not only are these the gateway(s) to all understanding, but they just might get you laid.

  • Kahlil Joseph

    Kahlil Joseph

    Seeming to arise from the video music world this past summer to land at MOCA, the path of “Kahlil Joseph: Double Conscience” may seem roundabout if one only follows the trails of his dreamlike images. Digging a bit deeper unearths multiple contemporary art connections: he’s the older brother to recently deceased painter Noah Davis of the Underground Museum (where Double Conscience/m.A.A.d. first screened in 2014), he was curated by Kara Walker into the exhibition “Ruffneck Constructivists” at ICA, Philadelphia, and he’s a former intern to artist Doug Aitken.

    Born in Seattle in 1981, Joseph came to Los Angeles in hopes of attending film school. When he didn’t get in anywhere, he studied a combination of art, art history, photography and television at Loyola Marymount University, immersing himself in film through Netflix and as a production assistant for music videos. He worked at Roman Coppola’s production company, Director’s Bureau, before taking an editing job with director Terence Malik that Joseph told an LA Times interviewer was “ …the best thing that ever happened to me. There was being born and there was this.”

    Kahlil Joseph, stills from the film m.A.A.d., 2014, photography by Chayse Irvin, courtesy of the artist.
    Kahlil Joseph, stills from the film m.A.A.d., 2014, photography by
    Chayse Irvin, courtesy of the artist.

    Joseph shoots mainly on film, and gained prominence via hypnotic music videos for FKA Twigs, Shabazz Palaces, the fashion house Kenzo, Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar; Double Conscience/m.A.A.d. was initially created for Lamar’s opening slots for Kanye West’s 2014 Yeezus tour. Lamar, a Compton native, gave Joseph his uncle’s home video footage to work with. Joseph had only a few weeks on the project before touring began; he spent nearly six months afterwards refining the piece. Installation specialists Commonwealth Projects (whose clients include Aitken and Isaac Julien) structured the two-channel split-screen variation at Underground Museum and MOCA; the split title is drawn from Lamar’s album good kid m.A.A.d. city and W.E.B. DuBois’ term describing the internal struggle of African Americans between their African heritage and American consciousness.

     

    Installation view of Kahlil Joseph: Double Conscience, March 20 – August 16, 2015 at MOCA Grand Avenue, courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, photographed by Chayse Irvin, installation photo by Brian Forrest.
    Installation view of Kahlil Joseph: Double Conscience, March 20 – August 16, 2015 at MOCA Grand Avenue, courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, photographed by Chayse Irvin, installation photo by Brian Forrest.

    Joseph’s work has sparked widespread interest, including pieces in W Magazine, i-D/VICE, The New Yorker and Art Papers, but he’s reticent to be interviewed, letting his work shift back and forth between increasingly blurred definitions of commercial video work and contemporary art. Joseph seems increasingly open to being redefined: “I’ve been getting a lot of requests to work with galleries,” he told Lily Lampe of i-D/VICE, “and I’ve been wondering what that work would be. It wouldn’t be another Kendrick Lamar or Flying Lotus… Ryan Trecartin said, ‘I thought I’d always be a filmmaker, but the arts community saw and responded to my work,’ and I said ‘Yeah, that’s how it’s been for me.’” In embracing the contemporary art world’s response, Joseph is clear on the perspective he embodies, as he notes in his 2015 Art Papers interview: “Almost all histories in black cinema aren’t really representations of us; most people who know black people on any level know that to be true …there are more black fine artists than there are filmmakers, which is crazy because the fine art world is one of the tightest-knit out there. But I think this underrepresentation is also an amazing opportunity for us: the black community is where all the great ideas are, it’s where the next generation of filmmakers are going to come from …once we start making movies in the same way that we make music, it’ll be undeniable.”

  • BEST IN SHOW 2015

    BEST IN SHOW 2015

    We live in interesting times—possibly the end of time, or at least the end of history as humans have conceived it over the last few millennia (an irony Francis Fukuyama never considered in the dislocated thesis for his 1989 essay and 1992 book, nor for that matter many of his critics). These epochal changes have been accompanied by a shift of consciousness, reflected and complemented by a range of ideas and attitudes observed throughout the culture. The best shows of 2015 addressed this shift in variously distinctive ways, with a view to its impact on our perceptions of and relations to self and society. Whether historical surveys, career retrospectives, or solo/themed gallery shows—all spoke to the way we move through the world, and the way we construct meaning from it.

    Christian Schad, Agosta, "The Winged One," and Rasha, "The Black Dove", 1929
    Christian Schad, Agosta, “The Winged One,” and Rasha, “The Black Dove”, 1929

    1. The New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919ñ1933

    LACMA

    ends January 18, 2016

    The cool matter-of-fact appraisals of the post-Expressionist Weimar Republic artists held up an uncanny distant mirror to the still colder, frank and culturally self-conscious gaze of contemporary artists and their evolving relations to self and society.

    Noah Purifoy, Strange Fruit, 2002.
    Noah Purifoy, Strange Fruit, 2002.

    2. Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada

    LACMA

    ends January 3, 2016

    At a moment when the old dialectics of formalism seemed trite and exhausted, it was nothing short of miraculous to come upon work—mostly produced in the last century—that merged a native Dada sensibility (borne out of the legacy of the African-American holocaust) with an expansive postmodern vocabulary both figurative and abstract.

    Anish Kapoor, Gabriel, the Angel, stops and listens to the silence of the cave, 2014.
    Anish Kapoor, Gabriel, the Angel, stops and listens to the silence of the cave, 2014.

    3. Anish Kapoor

    Regen Projects

    February, 2015

    In a year when we were confronting the advent of a new geologic age defined by the human imprint, Kapoor made a work, as meditative as it was monumental, addressing that imprint and our consciousness of it the centerpiece of his exhibition here; making reference, beyond the expected perceptual and gravitational reversals, to the carnage and delirium that must inevitably flow from it.

    Candice Lin, Installation View, "You are a spacious fluid sac", Ghebaly Gallery, 2015
    Candice Lin, Installation View, “You are a spacious fluid sac”, Ghebaly Gallery, 2015

    4. Candice Lin: You are a spacious fluid sac

    François Ghebaly

    September, 2015

    Having reached that tipping point that defines the age as Anthropocene, Lin’s recent show fastened on curiosities that might reconfigure the human view of its toxic symbiosis in the biosphere (e.g., forbidding objects that alluded to traumatic insemination), its unrelenting extractions and pollutions—with a centerpiece that beckoned viewers to a cozy look at their future.

    Sadie Benning, "Explosion", 2014, Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Photo: Chris Austin
    Sadie Benning, “Explosion”, 2014, Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Photo: Chris Austin

    5. Sadie Benning: Fuzzy Math

    Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

    January, 2015

    Notwithstanding references to sets, sequences, intervals, geometries and the like, there was nothing fuzzy in references as proto-linguistic and structural as they were mathematical; and ambiguities reduced to Steinbergian conundrums with rigor and (dare I say?) mathematical elegance.

    John McAllister, Molten Once Shed Such Chiming, 2015.
    John McAllister, Molten Once Shed Such Chiming, 2015.

    6. John McAllister: Sultry Spells Rapture

    Richard Telles Fine Art

    September, 2015

    McAllister’s singular French-Japanese hybrid surrendered, as the show’s title suggested, to the sheer rapture of an uninterrupted field of artifice levitating between its envelope of pattern and decoration and idyll of manicured nature, with the luxuriance of an irradiated hothouse and subaquatic palette that owed something to late Bonnard, with a nod to Matisse’s abstracted cut-out line.

    Matthew Brandt, Rainbow Lake, WY A20, 2013
    Matthew Brandt, Rainbow Lake, WY A20, 2013

    7. Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography

    Getty Center

    April, 2015

    Beyond the extraordinary quality of the work exhibited, this illuminating show focused principally on its seven artists’ engagement with medium, materials and the technical aspects of their practices; yet throughout, we also see an apprehension poised between physical place, philosophical encounter, and time itself.

    Tala Madani, Son Down, 2015
    Tala Madani, Son Down, 2015

    8. Tala Madani: Smiley has no nose

    David Kordansky Gallery

    July, 2015

    Acting out and expiating the patriarchy, Madani’s Every(cave)man, ruled by phallus and bodily fluids generally, is illuminated by a radiant Smiley emoji; also interrogated, tortured and crucified—suggesting that the aftermath of patriarchy will be just as messy as the preceding 5,000 years of it.

    Anne Percoco, Indra's Cloud, 2008
    Anne Percoco, Indra’s Cloud, 2008

    9. Gyre: The Plastic Ocean

    USC Fisher Museum

    ends January 3, 2016

    It is the signature material of the Anthropocene (and possibly its coffin nail), and literally the widening gyre that, alongside the climate warming that is its twin, threatens to kill the oceans. The show’s archaeological feel is prescient—it could serve as the first such show for the new Jurassic Age that will be the Anthropocene’s last gasp.

    Loretta Fahrenholz, still from film Ditch Plains, 2013.
    Loretta Fahrenholz, still from film Ditch Plains, 2013.

    10. This Is the End

    Hammer Museum (Hammer Projects)

    April, 2015

    From Loretta Fahrenholz’s view of a throttled New York vibrant even in its death throes, to Ed Atkins’ relentless probing of the gaping wound that is human nature itself, to Tommy Hartung’s oracular, quasi-messianic epic-assemblage chanting us to our final immolation, we were reminded that artists everywhere felt the tipping-point edge of biospheric pathology.

    Honorable mentions: William Pope.L Trinket, MOCA; Paperworks, Craft and Folk Art Museum; Raymond Pettibon, Regen Projects; Raku: The Cosmos In A Bowl, LACMA.

  • Inside a Pause: Adriana Salazar

    Inside a Pause: Adriana Salazar

    Octavio Paz wrote, “this hour has the shape of a pause.” Adriana Salazar’s videos situate us inside such a pause, places where we are in nature while watching human artifacts become nature.
    I met Salazar in Mexico City this past November, though I knew of her work from 2013 and 2014 solo exhibitions at Grand Central Art Center and UCR ARTSblock and her inclusion in the 2013 California-Pacific Triennial at OCMA. Through mutual friends, we connected and spent the day gallery-hopping in the vast and beautiful city where Salazar is completing her PhD in the Faculty of Arts and Design at Mexico’s renowned UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico).

     

    Adriana Salazar, Algunas cosas se mueven, otras no (Some things move, others don’t), 2012
    Adriana Salazar, Algunas cosas se mueven, otras no (Some things move, others don’t), 2012

    The Panteón de Dolores, the largest cemetery in Mexico City, is the setting for Salazar’s 20-minute video, Algunas cosas se mueven, otras no (Some things move, others don’t), of 2012. Lote #1, from the same year, moves us through an abandoned lot in her home city of Bogotá prior to its being expropriated for urban development. She shot the video days before the lot was closed to become “part of a plan to build a large avenue that will eventually go through it,” she explained in an email.

     

    Adriana Salazar, Lote 1, 2012
    Adriana Salazar, Lote 1, 2012

    Salazar’s acute eye for the overlooked and the melancholic grace of decay brings us into a realm where we can move at a softer pace, where nature’s sounds overtake the human in an aural parallel to her videography. The occasional sound of a broom or a car horn is beneath the birdsong and the wind sound. Like these sounds, objects are portrayed as secondary to nature—such as the gray jumpsuit from Lot #1, which has become flattened into soil.

     

    Vida quieta (Still life), 2012.
    Vida quieta (Still life), 2012.
    Vida quieta (Still life), 2012.
    Vida quieta (Still life), 2012.

    The decaying graves of Some things move or the discarded objects of Lot #1 are both remainders and reminders of human life, but they’ve taken on new states of becoming as they quietly disintegrate. This is the heart of Salazar’s project: she reveals how remains—whether human or object, loved or unloved—are absorbed into nature, into something else. Stasis and change, stillness and motion—these dualities are eliminated by the artist to converge into another manifestation. This subtle morphing between life and death is echoed in her 2014 artist’s statement: “Through questioning our rituals and cultural practices we become aware of our mortality, while we realize that we are also part of a layer of dirt in the changing surface of the earth.”

     

    Adriana Salazar, Pájaro #2 (Bird #2), 2011
    Adriana Salazar, Pájaro #2 (Bird #2), 2011

    Salazar’s videos reveal the subtlest of gestures: the breeze blowing scraps of ribbon or a balloon at a gravesite, the branch of a tree or a weed in motion. These bits and pieces arrest us in a way they rarely would on the daily. This attention to detail is reminiscent of the artist’s installation works, such as “Pájero #2 (Bird #2)” (2011) or “Vida quieta (Still life)” (2012) where miniature motors and nylon line make the smallest of gestures into monuments.

    This artist guides, not forces, us to observe a stillness that is always in motion. We notice how a simple ceramic vessel picturing the Guadalupe has been absorbed into the knot of a tree. Through such refinements of vision, Salazar traces the slow recovery of humanity by nature. The weeds seem to be winning and we are strangely glad.

     

    See Adriana Salazar’s video Algunas cosas se mueven, otras no (Some things move, others don’t), 2012, on our website, artillerymag.com