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Month: July 2017
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DECODER
Let me be honest with you, New York, I can start a Wednesday all about a museum visit on Friday but by Thursday evening the empty glasses, subway transfers and texts will have stacked up and in the anxious back-brain, an idea will begin to pool and shift and the shifting is as a python and that python is the frightening prospect of waking up before noon and being in Manhattan before 3. It’s definitely true I’m an artist (it says 711510 on my taxes) and I have 10 days, but I can’t say I fully intend to see art. It’s not that I don’t want to; it’s just almost anything else takes precedence—coffee with a blogger or a grilled-cheese place with a good view of a gory traffic accident. I do, in general, vastly prefer art to life, so I’m not sure how it keeps happening. Let’s check the listings:
Emily Dickinson at the Morgan Library. Dickinson wrote poems about death. I read them, I don’t need to look at like daguerreotypes of them. Turner, O’Keefe and Rauschenberg—all respectively somewhere. I am not sure there has ever not been a Turner, O’Keefe or Rauschenberg retrospective on during my lifetime.
Cindy Sherman at at the Mnuchin Gallery Cindy Sherman’s satirical society-lady portraits at the Mnuchin (not Munchkin) Gallery. On 78th Street: so possibly the greatest act of creative hand-that-feeds-you biting since Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers—or it would be if people cared about art but this is America. I think if you go to New York and you could’ve seen Sherman and you don’t see Sherman they burn you. Same with the Biennial, probably.
The listings also say there’s one of these things where a historical society invites an installation artist in to move the stuff in the historical society around so it’s art in a different way, and one of those things by a different kind of installation artist where the photo in the listing is a bunch of regular people ambiguously occupied in an arty space and the press copy just says social something and it challenges something but no idea what the art actually consists of. Likewise New York Loves Italy and New York At Its Core have no pictures in the listings and what any of that means—other than that local pride is still strong—is ambiguous.
Exhibit on Thomas Jefferson—which will only be depressing in 2017. Carol Rama is like a pre–Annette Messager surreal body–feminist painter–sculptor, now dead. Fluid metaphors. Could be a pip. Japan Society show is about the third gender—the wakashu—which seems like a good thing to have seen if you get stuck for something to talk about at a party. Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s. Ew. Rendering the Unspeakable: Artists Respond to 9/11. But everything is still unspeakable. Maurizio Cattelan is apparently the only living human male having a museum-worthy show in New York. Natural History Museum has mummies and I was thinking what you’re thinking: Fuck mummies. But this has not just Egyptian mummies but then also Peruvian mummies, which are much spookier and better and sometimes look like they’re screaming and like 8 years old.
Even better there’s “Like Us: Primate Portraits by Robin Schwartz” and Google has a picture of a crab-eating macaque with a banana taking a bath in a sink. It’s at the Alice Austen House Museum, whatever that means, on fucking Staten Island. On the one hand, that’s a long way to go to see a picture of a monkey. On the other hand, that totally sounds like something I’d do. Also: you know whomever you meet out at a show like that is going to be a fantastic lunatic.
Alien Covenant So I don’t have the excuse that the art sucks. I still might not see any. But I’m definitely going to see Alien: Covenant. Which probably won’t even be good but I’m doing it. The major difference between a late-era Alien movie and the likewise opulent late-Surrealist/Lee Bontecou/HR Giger/Eva Hesse biohorror lineage of the Guggenheim’s Anicka Yi show is the Alien movie happens in the dark and sitting down, and if you bring a girl to it she might go “Aaah!” and grab you, which is a clear advantage. But then the Guggenheim also has some sort of recursive show about the anniversary of the Guggenheim at the Guggenheim about the Guggenheim, which is really an excuse to stand in the white and platonic space looking at Pollocks—which puts me as close to where I prefer to be as art alone can.
I think I’ve probably guilted myself into seeing art. I hope Alien doesn’t suck because then I’m definitely going to have to look at art.
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BUNKER VISION
Life happens fast. Yesterday’s dystopian fiction is today’s reality. American history now includes a woman in the 21st century being arrested and found guilty by a jury for laughing at somebody. Most places that have an awareness of despots also have some pearls of wisdom about laughter being the bane of despots. In the new normal you may not need to travel to foreign countries to find authoritarian behavior to mock, but there is plenty to learn from people who have made such trips.
The current favorite authoritarian tourist destination is North Korea. If you poke around YouTube, there are a surprising number of tourist videos from the Hermit Kingdom. Nobody just wanders around without a minder pointing a camera at anything they want, but a running motif when you watch a lot of them is the surreptitious moment where the tourist whispers: “I don’t think I’m supposed to film this.”
Recently a Prog Rock band called Round Eye—of American expats based in Shanghai—were permitted to film a rock video in North Korea. Although they had permission to film at a carnival, if the camera strayed by an inch, the footage could be confiscated. One of their best stories includes an approved (staged) image that is compelling in its strangeness: A group of young children are seated at a curb working on adult-skill-level plein-air paintings. Although the paintings are finished and the paint is dry, the children continue to move the brushes in a mime of applying paint.
The current gold standard for getting a candid look inside this secretive world has been set by a Russian filmmaker who went in thinking that North Korea would be something like a time capsule of the USSR. When he realized that North Korea lacked the culture of critical thinking as well as films, libraries and theaters, the focus of the project changed.
The company had already agreed to use a script provided by the government. Minders on the set coached the actors in what was supposed to be a documentary about a family whose daughter was preparing to join an elite youth group.The director’s alarm grew when the minders meddled in every scene, but he left the camera running, and thanks to some genius pre-planning the camera recorded on two memory cards, only one of which the censors were allowed to inspect and edit each night. He also hired a sound engineer who was fluent in Korean, so he would know what the minders had planned. The resulting film, Under the Sun (2015), is a case study in how to subtly undermine authoritarian situations.
It used to be taken for granted that the First Amendment meant that it was safe to point and laugh. As laughter becomes an actionable offense, it is time to learn the lessons of people who have penetrated the veil of the Hermit Kingdom and apply them to the Mirthless Kingdom. Double up your memory cards, and stream everything you film to a remote location. It’s going to be a bumpy ride!
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ASK BABS
I Love A Man in a Uniform
Dear Babs, Why is it that with all the focus on hip, cutting-edge contemporary art displayed in modern museums and galleries, the security guards dress like they are working at the May Company in the ’70s? The women dress like men and the clothes are ugly and badly fitted. Who’s in charge of this?
—Julie Shapiro, Los Angeles
Dear Julie, I have to disagree with you… I like a man/woman in a uniform, where apropos. I’ve seen the alternative attire for security guards and oftentimes they are indistinguishable from museumgoers. Why does everything need to be “hip” anyways? The casual dress for almost everything these days seems improper to me. My father refused to wear denim jeans, saying they were for farmers. Let’s take the country outta the museum at least for a day. Maybe the security attire just needs a good pressing and a better tailor. Otherwise, I’m all for the conservative look at an art institution.
FREE MONEY
Dear Babs, Where and how do I apply for artists’ grants, public art opportunities and residencies?
—Ann Marshall, San Francisco
Dear Ann, I consulted Los Angeles artist and friend Linda Vallejo, who teaches grant writing. She assures me there are several places to find grant opportunities. A simple search can be conducted with the key words “artist grant” or “artist fellowship.” Also there is a wonderful research center funded by the Foundation Center at the library in Santa Monica, California, where there are dedicated computers that allow individuals and organizations to search for grant opportunities. These services are free. And here is Vallejo’s website for classes if you’re interested. Good luck! www.atozgrantwriting.com
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FILM: Manifesto
The film Manifesto speaks in the voice of the 20th century, when manifestos meant something—a time when the latest artist or art movement stormed the Bastille of conformity, declaring the one true doctrine—theirs, naturally—and the rest of us sat up and paid attention. Well, nix that. Nowadays we are a far more jaded audience, and it’s hard to know whether to take the statements in Manifesto seriously, or to file them away with the rest of the loony rants we’ve heard from people who claim they will fix things with ideology. In Manifesto, which just opened in limited theatrical release, German artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt presents excerpts from some 60 authors in 13 dramatized scenes, all featuring the extraordinary Cate Blanchett. In some ways this film is a showcase for her chameleon talents as she assumes a cast of characters—among them, a homeless man, a middle-class homemaker, a trader on the trading floor, an imperious choreographer, a puppet master with her look-alike creation. Blanchett is a powerful and compelling actress, and her presence is a major reason to see this film.
The opening is an out-of-focus close-up of a burning fuse, then Blanchett’s voice telling us, “I’m against action, I’m for continuous contradiction, for affirmation, too… I do not explain because I hate common sense. I’m writing a manifesto because I have nothing to say.” Rosefeldt spent a couple years combing through art manifesto texts of the 20th century, a process which I would have found akin to sitting in the dentist’s chair, but which he claims, in a phone interview from Berlin, “was very joyful.”
However, he decided not to identify these quotes during the film—a frustration to the audience and a disservice to the authors—so we don’t know that the previous quote is from Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto 1918.” Okay, a Dadaist would say something like that. Later, accompanied by the sound of a ticking clock or metronome, comes a series of headshots of Blanchett as characters we will see, interspersed with names such as Karl Marx, André Breton, Vasily Kandinsky, Barnett Newman, Yvonne Rainer, John Cage, Adrian Piper, Jim Jarmusch and Werner Herzog. I believe Marx’s quote is early in the film, and yes, you will find attributions, such as they are, in a quick roll-by at the very end of the credits.
Fortunately, Manifesto is very beautifully shot, with many tracking or drone shots of the bleak architecture of modern Berlin and its environs, of people in eerily fascinating settings. It is also wonderfully imaginative in presenting its material, although some scenes are far better than others. Among the most inventive are a scene of Blanchett as a mother presiding over a midday meal with her middle-class family, and praying, “I am for an art that is political or radical, mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum,” and another in which she gives a funeral sermon: “One dies as a hero or as an idiot, which is the same thing.” A few portrayals are so hammy that they are nearly funny, such as Blanchett playing a drunken Goth girl flailing about in the aftermath of a rock party. The best scenes are more nuanced—such as Blanchett as a sleek CEO greeting supporters in a posh living room, and declaring “Long live the great art vortex!”
Rosefeldt says that the film was originally shown in segments, as part of a multi-channel art installation. If you read through the credits, you’ll learn that each scene has a theme or themes—for example, the puppetmaster one is about Surrealism/Spatialism. That makes sense. However, the film has pulled apart the scenes so that they are sandwiched in between one another, which makes it more fun to watch visually but harder to understand intellectually.“These guys had such great fun writing this stuff,” says Rosefeldt. And yes, the quotes are mostly from guys, yet again mansplaining things to us. “They were, of course, provoking. That’s what you do, you pretend to be very sure about it. That’s something art historians forget. There are 13 text collages, 60 authors, I kind of love them all. I agree and disagree with them.”
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RECONNOITER
Elena Shtromberg is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Utah. She is co-curator (with Glenn Phillips, curator and head of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute) for the PST LA/LA exhibition of “Video Art In Latin America” on view September 17 at LAXART in Hollywood.
What led to the decision to categorize the videos showing at LAXART into thematic programs? Were you and co-curator Glenn Phillips beginning to see patterns when viewing over 2000 videos?
We were committed from the beginning to doing a thematic show. Most of the histories that currently exist about video art in Latin America are written as national histories—that is, video art in Peru, Colombia, Chile, etc.—and we wanted to put the works we saw into dialogue with each other across different historical periods and different geographies. We chose themes that resonate not only across different countries in Latin America but globally.Did you have any idea of the quantity of videos you’d be considering and watching?
No, I think we imagined there was work, but not in the quantity that we found. We currently have a record of about 4000 works in our database and know that this is hardly comprehensive and that there is a lot more work to document.When did you come on board with Getty for this project? Did you move here to work on PST LA/LA?
I actually live between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City and when I’m not in SLC, I’m here. I have a longstanding relationship with the Getty Research Institute, and Glenn and I have worked together on video programs before. In 2005, we co-curated a program on pioneering work in Brazilian video art, and in 2006, we did a program on U.S./Mexico Border video art. In 2011, while I was a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute, we discussed beginning a research project on video art in Latin America, expanding our interest in video to include work that wasn’t well known and on which there was little written about. We wanted to collect research materials and make them publicly available, and give students the materials they need to research and write about this work further. That was in 2012. We began the project in 2013 with a trip to Mexico and eventually, after the announcement of Pacific Standard Time, we decided to expand our project with an exhibition as well. However, it won’t end when PST is over. We intend to continue to work on this so that we can make the materials accessible, including a publication of essays and translated primary texts that we hope will come out in 2019.How many videos will be presented at the LAXART exhibition? Will they be showing simultaneously, or will you rotate some of the work?
We have six thematic programs with about 10 works per program; we haven’t yet finalized it but the total will be somewhere in the range of 65 works. There are three gallery spaces at LAXART where people will be able to see the programs, and they will be looped, the first three will run followed by the next three. We also have a number of large and small installations throughout the space that people can come see even if they don’t have time to watch a whole program, which run about 45 to 50 minutes. And we have offered to show the individual programs at different institutions throughout Southern California. For example, we are doing a program at the West Hollywood Library and hope to work out a series of sessions at different universities that have contacted us with interest.What would you say was your biggest discovery about Latin American art when visiting and traveling throughout the continent?
I think for me, what continues to impress and interest me is how many microhistories there are. In some ways it is very difficult to think about one Latin American art, and I think one of the things that this version of PST will bring out is the diversity and multiplicity within this field. During the last four years of travel for this project I learned that I could continue this research for another 40 years and still not become fluent in this history. There are artists/artworks and countries that figure more prominently, but what you find is that when you travel to countries whose art is lesser known, you will find so many stories that haven’t been told and so many unique and oftentimes spectacular works by artists who are largely unknown outside of their country. I was surprised to learn how little interaction artists in neighboring countries have with each other. They are much more likely to know work out of the U.S. and Europe than that of their neighbors. -
ART/VERSE
Kick the Can
by Maw Shein Win
That utopian moment
when the film begins
& the sound spins,
awash in honey & blood,
saliva & wine.
Let’s kick the can!
Alive in the eye of projection,
variations of pink on aqua.
In Icelandic they say “invisible.”
In Spanish they say “as blissful.”
Amplify echo of heart.
Modulate cadence of brain.
Cinematic monuments to spent desire.
A flash of eternity in the ecstasy grid -
SHOPTALK
NEW MUSEUM IN TOWN
Welcome Marciano Art Foundation on Wilshire Boulevard! It’s the new museum that features the contemporary art collection of Paul and Maurice Marciano, two of the brothers who founded the hip jeans company Guess and became zillionaires. The museum sits in a former Scottish Rite Masonic temple that stretches a city block, and opened to the public on May 25. Maurice seems to be the man running the show, as he opened the press conference a few days earlier.
Museum facade on Wilshire Blvd, Yoshiro Makino, Courtesy of wHY and Marciano Art Foundation The space is impressive, at 100,000 square feet, with selections from the permanent collection in two parts of the museum, and “Jim Shaw: The Wig Museum” in what was formerly the theater. The Shaw exhibit is long overdue; it’s the first museum show in LA of our local art hero—yes, hard to believe, but true. It’s also hard to imagine what museum could have contained some of these installations, which require triple-height ceilings, such as the one showing a cloud-borne George Washington, or perhaps God, issuing a giant vacuum cleaner from his loins. The machine is hovering up flailing souls. Here as elsewhere Shaw has re-used the elaborately painted backdrops found in the building—putting new paint on them, cutting into them. The smaller installations are also clever and fascinating—in one room, there’s a display of wigs—the Masons loved putting on little morality plays, replete with wigs, costumes and backdrops. The old wigs are interspersed with Shaw’s own ever-quirky inventions.
Elsewhere during the press preview a scenic painter was putting finishing touches around the mezzanine for part of Alex Israel’s wall mural. When Israel spotted him, he quickly told the man to stop, lest anyone realize Israel is not the one whose hand hath made the work.
NEA REVISITED
This spring we learned a couple valuable lessons from the struggle over the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)—the Far Right hates artists, but the NEA has successfully strategized its grantsmanship to survive. At least for now. Earlier this year the Empire—er, I mean the White House—proposed a stopgap federal budget which would have eviscerated the NEA, NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) and CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting). In May, Congress reinstated those agencies—indeed, it added $2 million to the NEA, for a total annual budget of $150 million. However, that increase barely keeps up with inflation—currently 2.4%—and on May 23, the proposed White House budget for FY2018 again guts the NEA, and rings the death knell for CPB.
Why is the White House so eager to defund the NEA? Is it really because—as Office of Budget and Management Director Mick Mulvaney claims—giving money to the arts is patently unfair to American workers?
John Fleck, recently performing at this year’s LACE Benefit Auction. Fleck is one of the NEA Four, whose NEA grant was denied in 1990, photo by Lynda Burdick at Vibiana DTLA. Or is it because the Far Right sees artists as troublemakers and hooligans, who like to disrupt and question the status quo? (That would be correct, actually.) The Far Right protects the status quo because they intimately benefit from it, and really, they’d like to wind the clock back farther, to a time when the NEA didn’t exist.
Fortunately, over the decades the agency has managed to win Congress to its side by giving grants to every state in the union, and to community groups, not individuals. In 2016 more than 350 arts programs in California received NEA grants, totaling over $9 million. This included everything from $10,000 to support an arts mentoring program in Venice to $99,500 to support a rural arts program in Fresno; in LA, there were grants to the Craft and Folk Art Museum and to East West Players.
The budget of the NEA is relatively tiny. It could be funded, in full or in part depending on whose estimate you take, if the First Lady actually lived in the White House, rather than in NYC. On the high side, it is estimated that the public is spending $500,000 to $1 million a day for security, etc., to look after Melania. In February NYC Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill stated that it costs $127,000 to $146,000 a day for this service, which jumps to $308,000 when His Lordship is in NYC. What has not been factored in is all those weekend trips to Mar-a-lago—NYC is not his only home away from home.
Dear Reader, feel free to call your Congressperson in support of the NEA. Yes, just dial away—the people who answer are keeping tabs on this, so it will matter.
R.I.P. ACME.
Well, it looks like another one of our stalwart galleries is biting the dust. ACME moved from Wilshire Boulevard to the Frogtown district, down by the LA River, last November—part of the flight from mid-Wilshire due to Metro construction—opening with shows by Jennifer Steinkamp and Daniel Cummings. Then in early June the gallery sent out a cryptic e-poster of a sunset over mountains with the words, “ACME./1994–2017/with appreciation and gratitude/thank you all!” When I called up Randy Sommer, one of the original founders along with Robert Gunderman, and asked whether it meant they were closing, Sommer said, “Sadly, it’s true. We’ve had some great reviews for our shows, but reviews don’t pay the bills.”
Robert Gunderman 
Randy Sommer Like many galleries these days, especially in a time of increasing traffic congestion, they had trouble getting people to come to the gallery—although they had better visitorship in their most recent location. They did enjoy their new gallery, says Sommer, “It’s a very happening place.” On a Frogtown artwalk last year, I was impressed with the influx of architectural firms, fabrication shops and artists installed in the area—but there were no mainstream art galleries. ACME was the first, and for the time being, the last.
HERB ALPERT AWARD WINNERS
This is one of the most important awards given to artists in this country—the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, an unrestricted grant of $75,000 given to five artists involved in Dance, Film/Video, Music, Theater and the Visual Arts. Every year it’s given out in a rather informal ceremony at Alpert’s office building in Santa Monica, attended largely by those involved in the arts. But alas, you can’t apply. You have to be nominated; then the list is reviewed by a jury of three experts in the field.
Kerry Tribe, Exquisite Corpse This year the Visual Arts award went to Bay-Area artist Amy Franceschini, whose multidisciplinary practice often addresses environmental concerns. Closer to home, our own Kerry Tribe won the Film/Video award—well deserved. I thought her documentary for last year’s “Current LA” was probably the best work in that event. Exquisite Corpse took us on a rambling journey down the LA River, meeting with some of the quirky and wonderful folk who live along the way. I saw it during an evening projection in Sunnynook River Park—yes, so apt since we were right by the LA River. Congrats, Kerry! And thank you, Herb, for so generously funding these awards for 23 years.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Congratulations to Artillery contributor Liz Goldner
for awards in art criticism from the Orange County Press Club. -
RETROSPECT
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 Untitled painting of a skull looks like a prison that can barely contain all the rage, anger and fierce memories that drive a person. Painted in graffiti style, it is young and barely controlled. You wonder how it is ever going to get through life and then you wonder what could ever turn it into the mournful helpless bone-white thing we are accustomed to seeing when death finally takes it.
Now it just sold for $110.5 million. What does this mean? That there is a million-dollar difference between seeing a work of art and owning it—possessing it? As I write this, all I have to do if I want to see it is close my eyes. Frankly, I would rather do this experiment with Picasso’s Guernica; it is more beautiful and, at the same time, more terrifying. I wonder how much it would cost? But that doesn’t matter, does it?
Money is involved on a different scale than the most beautiful, or meaningful things, or what the inside of your head does every time it is confronted with an image that you are deeply moved by. It can be a painting or a memory, a tree or a child that causes you to feel. Art is made by man. When money is involved the object has to be made by man. The actual sunset, the moon in the night sky, or a human skull—well that price is astronomical and therefore it is free.
Things made by man cost money to show their value, just in case we forget—we are such a forgetful pack of mutants. It also shows the power of the collector, just in case we forget this too, because we are such a mindless bunch of lemmings. But then there is another wrinkle—whatever costs the most money is the best, and if you don’t think so you could lose your membership to the human race. This can be very disruptive. Only the rich get to say what is good?
Now we don’t decide whether we like it or not—we are being told. And suddenly we are staring at something we really don’t like, while munching on a piece of cheese, and swallowing more champagne than necessary just to prove we are so interested in someone else’s idea of art because we don’t really give a fuck, we just want to see that much money move from point A to point B because that’s what really gets us off.
Is a graffiti skull more beautiful than a Georgia O’Keeffe skull? Neither of which are nearly as impressive as the skull you still remember from that horror movie, where your Nana had to drag you out, kicking and screaming in terror. Boy, was that mind-blowing or what?
Wake me up when a painting costs as much as a sunset, or when a sunset impresses us as much as a painting. I’ll be on the couch dreaming of something I never saw before—but something I recognized… from the past or the future. Or something that had been right here beside me all the time. And that is priceless.
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Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
The figures are in motion, contorted, double-jointedly bending over themselves—so confused with playing multiple roles that a single, consistent identity becomes, at best, elusive and in its most virulent form, theater of the absurd; a brand of schizophrenia that incessantly whispers (in your voice) the same toxic message. In this scenario self-effacement becomes self-defense. It is no wonder. Blackness in the United States has always been considered an affliction. From the criminalization of presumed equality—bumptious conduct—it is clear that parity is an absurd notion. Uneven punishment permeates not only criminal justice but also primary school. In his book, The Protest Psychosis, Vanderbilt professor Jonathan Metzl demonstrates that being black can drive one crazy—at least in mental health diagnoses. He demonstrates a clear shift where, beginning with the Black Pride movement in the 1960s, the medicalization of dissent skewed schizophrenia heavily away from white housewife toward black radical.
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle The Evanesced #24, 2016, © Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, 2017, Courtesy of the artist and Jenkins Johnson Gallery There are seven large drawings in this exhibition, on buff-colored canvas. The 100 sketches included are also buff. So are the walls, a clever bit of museum design that gives the illusion that the exhibition is in the process of disappearing. These women are disappearing—the images are variations of the artist herself who is revealing and illustrating our willful amnesia. The title of the exhibition, “The Evanesced,” refers to the disappearance of black women in our culture, historically and in recent memory. Hinkle’s elegant ink line drawings—calligraphic, rubbed away, then redrawn—refer specifically to the murder of black women by the “Grim Sleeper” serial killer, to whom it is widely suspected that the Los Angeles police devoted less investigative attention than if the victims had been white, as well as the recent deaths of black women at the hands of police across the nation. While the 100 small sketches have a vibrancy that mimics animation, it is the seven larger works that anchor the narrative. Each is titled in a synonym for obscuration—though six-feet tall and four-feet wide—and none of the women meet the gaze of the viewer (lest they be accused of reckless eyeballing).
Dispersion is three-breasted and kneeling, twisting away from us as her paired hands obscure her head. Amnesia arises from a puff of smoke and disgorges a miniature woman who may be giving birth. Eclipse is in motion, two-headed and four-legged, and her braids rise like smoke. Uproot is a figurehead floating above mountains. Her breasts are detached, her hair cropped close; she is a sign in the sky, a deceitful promise. Blackout is weighed down by a thicket of bad hair; she is an anti-Rapunzel, impaled by her most distinctive trait. Dissolve tumbles, head down, her hose wrinkling down to coils around her upended and torqued calves, enveloped by her oversized hips and breasts. Blemish is masked and kneeling, her face hidden by the only color in these works, a dazzle of complements, drawing attention yet hidden.
For the seven sisters in this sorority, the hazing never stops.
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Star Montana
In exquisite large-scale photographs, figures of hope, variously tinged with the pain of day-to-day reality, exude optimism, gazing upward and confidently looking straight at the camera and viewer. The portraits in Star Montana’s “I Dream of Los Angeles” punctuate the long history of the portrait and the portrait artist. In the style of the grand manner portrait, the sitters are ennobled through their insistent postures and the artist’s use of idyllic, “golden hour” lighting, when everything is washed with warm reds and yellows.
Southern California Impressionism used this same color palate and light to eulogize the bucolic landscape that skirted the growing city centers. Montana’s work shifts the focus and situates this painterly aesthetic squarely inside the city centers, infusing the same sublime romanticism into neighborhoods that are in varied stages of gentrification. She studies not only how the light hits her subjects, but also how it reflects off the concrete surfaces, building walls, public spaces, backyards and parks of these quickly changing areas. The images cement a vision of often overlooked parts of the city, and the artist’s own experiences there, allegorizing the present residents as vital contributors to the culture and history of Los Angeles.
Though most of the sitters are strangers to Montana, a felt sense of familiarity, comfort and affection emerges in the photographs. The interaction of subject to lens is vulnerable and intimate, a connecting thread from Montana’s earlier and sincerely personal work that documented her family through the process of her mother’s premature death. The tenderness that arises in the photographs suggests that each of these portraits is potentially a self-portrait; Montana connects herself to the sitter, as though, through shared experience they become proxies of her. The large-scale (32 x 40”) prints further impart a sense of intimacy with the subject, as they are viewed close to life-size. Yet more importantly, the size serves to assert the presence of each individual, ensuring a place for those who are currently being displaced.
Through establishing a site of unified strength, refuge and visibility for her subjects, Montana poses strategic questions to the history of the photographic portrait. She reverses and repurposes its use to create a visual collective identity of what was and was not the model citizen, and the practice of photographers who documented people, and the neighborhoods they lived in, from the perspective of an outsider and would-be-savior.
The photographic portrait has been a dogmatic object, a political object charged with the demonstration, right or wrong, of cultural import. Montana knowingly addresses this past, capturing her subjects not as objects of display, but in her own intimate and humanizing perspective of what it looks like to be American, Mexican American, Chicanx, Latinx, or an Angeleno from Boyle Heights. Through her personal and emotive approach, the photographs return to the idealism of the portrait as commemoration of those we love and as valiant reflections of our most noble selves. Additionally through the act of locating these subjects within the museum walls, a more visually accurate archive arises, reversing the psychological damage of not previously seeing one’s reflection within those spaces.
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Women of Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionist painting remains one of the most pivotal and enigmatic art movements of the 20th century. Its continued influence on current abstract painting can be seen in the work of the best practitioners such as Albert Oehlen, Yayoi Kusama and Frank Stella. It endures today partly because the artists were able to synthesize essential qualities of modernism from late 19th and early 20th century European art into something that was truly new, achieving the ultimate embodiment of modern painting. Although it dominated contemporary art in the 1940s and 50s, it is known today mainly for the work of a handful of mostly male artists. Fortunately, history is currently being rewritten, as evidenced by the recent stellar exhibition “Women of Abstract Expressionism” at the Palm Springs Art Museum.
The initial impact of the show is startling; the quality and range of the work presented outshines most of the current abstract painting one sees these days in galleries and museums. It is no surprise that Joan Mitchell’s work stands out, since she is one of the best painters of this era, man or woman. Cercanto un Ago (1957), a nearly square, almost 8-foot canvas is abstract painting at its finest—no discernible image, but an emotional overflowing that stops you in your tracks.
Joan Mitchell Untitled 1952-53, Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York. On equal par with Mitchell is Lee Krasner, whose career was overshadowed by her husband Jackson Pollock, whom she was instrumental in guiding and promoting. Krasner possessed an acute understanding of modern painting, having studied with Hans Hofmann, and it shows in the strength of her paintings, which range greatly in style. Charred Landscape (1960) has an affinity with Pollock’s Black Paintings from 1951–53, yet is in no way derivative, and like most of her work looks uniquely her own.
Grace Hartigan is another strong presence in the show, in particular with her large work, The King is Dead (1950). Its overall composition bears close resemblance to Willem de Kooning’s Excavation from the same year. In contrast to de Kooning’s rather achromatic work, Hartigan’s painting is a riot of color, with primaries, plus black and white, which was characteristic of de Stijl, but its sensibility is exactly opposite.
Willem’s wife, Elaine de Kooning, stands out as well, but for the wrong reason—most of her paintings are clearly figurative. While it is true that Abstract Expressionism was never really as abstract as the critics of the day wanted it to be, de Kooning’s are figurative in the most obvious and pedestrian way. Her paintings that fare best here are those that are the most abstract, like the puissant Bullfight (1959), which is one of the most compelling works in the show, with its highly saturated, polychromatic color and tornado of crashing brushwork.
Deborah Remington, Apropos or Untitled, 1953, Denver Art Museum, Courtesy of the Deborah Remington Charitable Trust for the Visual Arts. The big surprise in the show is the work of several outstanding painters who are mostly unknown today, such as Mary Abbott, Perle Fine, and Deborah Remington. Abbott’s All Green (1954) projects an intoxicating lyricism akin to Miles Davis’ All Blues from his classic modal jazz recording, Kind of Blue, from the same time period. Fine’s distinctive use of undulating branch-like line work distinguishes her from the usual gestural approach seen throughout most of the show. Remington’s Phunky or Dacia (1956) is an enigmatic work sitting right on the edge between abstraction and figuration; it almost anticipates late Philip Guston.
Curator Gwen F. Chanzit described the genesis of the show as being concerned primarily with resurrecting artists from the period that have been overlooked, and it turned out that they were predominantly women. Shows like this one are important in bringing to light artists of quality that have been forgotten by history. It is difficult to imagine today what it must have been like in the 1950s to be a female Abstract Expressionist in an art world overwhelmingly dominated by men.
While today’s art world gender balance can hardly be called equitable, women artists are receiving far more attention than in any other period in history, and it’s about time that artists were judged by the quality of their work, not their gender, age, race, institutional pedigree or any other factor outside the work itself. Then perhaps exhibitions like this one won’t be necessary, and shows can be based upon themes and ideas rather than identity politics, which continues to dominate the national consciousness, perverting notions of quality and ghettoizing creative and human potential.
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Chris Antemann
The term forbidden fruit nowadays refers to mere guilty pleasures, but it once designated the fatal, tragic fruit of knowledge—knowledge of sex, or course, being a discovery that every generation makes defiantly, with mingled trepidation and delight. Chris Antemann’s Forbidden Fruit sculpture installation depicts that pleasure principle in action, minus moralizing; the tiny porcelain youngsters, dining and dallying, are charming and seductive, like Bosch’s naked figures in the central panel of his great triptych, but without a lost heaven or future hell waiting, so to speak, in the wings. Antemann wrote her master’s thesis in the porcelain figure tradition, and made figurines in the style for fifteen years before being offered, two years ago, the use of Meissen’s facilities and skilled artisans, resulting in an inspired collaboration.
The Rococo art of the mid-18th century, succeeding the religious dramas of the baroque era (e.g., Caravaggio) and preceding the political moralizing of the later neoclassic era (e.g., David, Ingres), is witty, decorative and aristocratic, and commonly associated today with the artifice and pomp of Louis XV’s court. If one later critic mocked its “jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants,” we in the late capitalist era can accept and admire its lighthearted fantasy and fanciful profusion. The Rococo painters Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard depicted fêtes galantes, with costumed figures lounging and flirting in manicured gardens, often endowed with mythological or allegorical themes. Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (1717), a mythological land of love and youth, epitomizes the style and worldview.
Chris Antemann, Forbidden Fruit Dinner Party (installation), 2013, Meissen Porcelain®, image courtesy of MEISSEN® Antemann updates the elaborate, symbolic dinner settings, or surtouts-de-table, created by Johann Joachim Kändler (1706–1775) for Ancien Régime festivities. At the center of the gallery—which is decorated with pink Rococo wallpaper, created digitally—sits, atop a large pedestal, Forbidden Fruit Dinner Party (2013), a multi-part installation. The central Love Temple (2013), is a circular Roman temple or pavilion housing doll-like banqueters in various states of erotic abandon, the structure festooned with allegorical figures: three Graces and four personified seasons.
Two flanking works, Tempted to Taste and Fruit of Knowledge (2014), depict pyramids of fruits associated with the Temptation—pomegranates from Asia; figs from Italy; and apples from Western Europe. Surrounding the fruit pillars are four small sculptures, Pursuit of Love, Secluded Kiss, Coronation, and Love Letter (all 2013), based on paintings that Fragonard made for Louis XV’s mistress, tracing romantic passion from vernal urgency to autumnal nostalgia. Around this central feast table are related works: Covet, Trifle and A Taste of Paradise (all 2013); and A Strong Passion, Little Maid, Ambrosia, A Delicate Domain, and Chandelier (all 2014).
Antemann’s meticulous craftsmanship and obvious affection for this tradition make for an interesting commentary on our times, beset by economic hardship and ruling-class denial: Apres moi, la déluge. In the wake of much postmodernist agitprop flattering today’s aristocrat collectors with ironic winks, Antemann’s elegant, humorous, girl-power updates of this pre-revolutionary tradition manage, improbably, to hit a cultural nerve. They may appear a mere spoonful of sugar, tiny cousins of Kara Walker’s gigantic sugar sphinx, but their subtlety and ambiguity are seductive, and, I would say, like Kändler’s fruits, which were once made from sugar but later metamorphosed into porcelain, more lasting.
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Richard Deacon
Forty-three works in an expansive range of media highlight Richard Deacon’s versatility in a broad yet uneven survey of the British sculptor’s art from 1979–2016 in “What You See Is What You Get” at The San Diego Museum of Art.
Deacon’s austerely lyrical configurations often seem vaguely referential to various real-world forms both factitious and organic. Under the Weather No. 1 (2016) evokes a coppice while also resembling two elongated chandeliers fused together. Though created without this show in mind, this piece appears to have always belonged at the exhibition’s entrance among electroliers and ornate doorway moldings.
Many sculptures exude a practical ambience like furniture or architecture; utile-looking accouterments make them seem like mysterious devices meant to serve unknown purposes. For example, shelf and curtain-like appurtenances give Falling on Deaf Ears No. 1 (1984) a utilitarian effect. Yet paradoxically, structural superfluities symbolize functionlessness. Fabrication is consistently emphasized in visible joints, glue bubbles and screws, most of these structurally unnecessary embellishments, the sculptural equivalent of phony dresser drawers or faux shoe buckles.
Richard Deacon, Housing 10, 2012, L.A. Louver, Venice, CA. His most impressive sculptures are large-scale, dominating their surroundings and transforming viewers’ spatial perception. Among them, Like a Bird (1984) connotes its titular animal as well as rocking chairs and upholstery shops; Distance No Object (1988) resembles a subterranean tunnel, water conduit, or skate park pipe; and Nothing is Allowed (1994) loosely suggests conveyor belts, inner tubes, and upholstered seats. Each of these emanates a singular presence with a plethora of evocations.
Metal and wood are Deacon’s fortes. Splashy ceramic pieces are relatively ineffective, seemingly decorative pastiches of other sculpture. Moreover, in Deacon’s hands, clay doesn’t lend itself to showing the process behind its creation. In contrast with his large sculptures’ commanding presence and multifarious connotations, most of his smaller pieces lack intricacy and nuance regardless of their medium. Though diminutive, they seem far less deserving of the space they occupy.
Overall, the exhibition is visually felicitous. Views of multiple sculptures are dynamically interwoven, while subtle similarities of form echo sonorously among different pieces. However, some presentational aspects are lacking. Although the time period spans over three decades, certain years are clustered; the choice of works for this exhibition was limited to collections held domestically. A preponderance of works from 1984–88, 2000, 2007 and 2012 leads one to wonder what else Deacon was producing in between, and how one body of work led to another, a curiosity compounded by the absence of didactic wall labels.
Information might easily have filled gaps; but curators honored the artist’s disinclination toward the customary didactics and instead offered information only via smartphone app. The decision to keep the space around the artworks “clean” in this manner is self-defeating; using a phone fundamentally alters one’s experience of the objects. This being Deacon’s first United States museum survey, the dearth of easily accessible explanatory information seems particularly regrettable. What you see may be what you get, but background and context can help you comprehend what you’re getting. Notwithstanding, Deacon’s sculptures speak eloquently for themselves; and this show does present enough fine examples to enable one to understand a substantial cross-section of his practice
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ON THE COVER
Teresa Solar Abboud, Untitled, 2017, detail photography from her “Ground Control” solo show at Galeria Joan Prats in Barcelona; part of our Summer Travel Issue where contributor Leanna Robinson visits Barcelona’s underground art scene. https://artillerymag.com/off-beaten-path-barcelona/
