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Author: Skot Armstrong
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London Calling
It’s that time of year again. The clocks have gone back, the streets are strewn with fallen leaves and there is culture, culture everywhere. Not only is the London Film Festival in full swing but there is Frieze Art Fair—with ever more American and Asian galleries making a debut showing—and it’s the Turner Prize season too. Now in its 28th year, this once rather shock-horror affair has become as much a part of the British social calendar as Wimbledon or the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Last year, when it decamped to northern climes at the BALTIC gallery in Gateshead, it added a certain frisson for those in need of maps and special travel equipment to leave the comfort of the metropolis. But this year it’s safely back in the hallowed portals of Tate Britain. Four very disparate artists—I was going to say “the good, the bad and the ugly”—but that doesn’t quite work—but you get the point, are up for the prize. Sometimes I wonder if anyone would care if it wasn’t set up like some beauty contest—with all the possibility for tears and gushing Academy-style acceptance speeches. But prevailing PR is that it’s the annual barometer of the newest and the best of British art; though in truth it’s really no more than the five judges’ current fave artists.
It kicks off with Paul Noble, the most obviously traditional of the contenders in that he makes graphite drawings on paper, producing works with the consummate skill of a surreally dystopian, fictional city called “Nobson’s Newtown.” Get it? ‘Knobs On.’ (For my American readers this is a bit of naughty British slang). Though, actually, it refers to the name of a blocky-looking typeface. Each drawing starts with a word at its center, spelling out its subject, which is then woven with a web of eclectic visual narratives. Intricate and scatological, from a distance they look like plans for a renaissance garden or a futuristic science laboratory. But get up closer and they’re full of rubbish bags and curious flora, as well as strange turd-like columns. Excreta seems to be a recurring theme. Noble’s is a futuristic world devoid of human presence so that it gives the appearance of being created by someone with Asperger’s syndrome but with inbuilt references to modernist art, including the sculptures of Henry Moore and the dreamscapes of Giorgio de Chirico.
Two of this year’s contestants are video artists and I found myself much affected and engaged by Luke Fowler’s work, All Divided Selves, 2011, the third in a trilogy of films that explore the ideas and legacy of fellow Glaswegian, the anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-89). I’m just about old enough to remember the effect of reading Laing for the first time in books that radically challenged the orthodoxy of psychiatric practice of the day and placed “madness” firmly within the arena of “society.” The matrix of archival material, intercut with clips from his own life, is too long for The Turner Prize to do it justice but evokes this truly revolutionary period with its complex philosophical and, at times, moving discussions that were carried out in smoke-filled rooms by those who might now be considered in need a good wash, a shave and a haircut. Still only 33, Fowler has produced a thoughtful and complex work that maps changing social mores and ideas.
The clever money is on the relatively unknown Elizabeth Price and her 20-minute The Woolworths Choir. Price uses archive film, diagrams and sound to create a work that’s part power-point lecture, part computer game. Using different sources—an Open University film on church architecture, clips of a girl band and some 1970s news footage of a terrible fire, she creates a potent mix. The first part is an illustrated lecture on ecclesiastical architecture of the 13th century. Using black-and-white archival photographs and textbook illustrations to define the shifting meaning of terms such as choir, quire and misericord, she takes us on a virtual tour of a Gothic church. The second half of the film tells the horrific story of how the Woolworths fire started. A stylish and sophisticated work, it plays with the shifting entomology of words, making reference to the Greek chorus which transmutes into the church choir and is cleverly linked to the girl bands. Though highly original, in comparison to Fowler’s baggier and felt work, it feels cooler and more contrived.
That just leaves Spartacus Chetwynd—and with a name like that who needs to worry about the art? At the private view I just missed her performance and found her cast of characters standing around with smudged face-paint dressed as trees, root vegetables and monsters like lost children after the school nativity play. The worthless performance may have been fun on the night but going back to the gallery on a weekday there’s nothing left except the empty props.
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Death and Glory
I visited the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens while its current exhibition, “A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War,” was being installed. I’d be tempted to call the Huntington a “peculiar institution,” had that phrase not already been coined as a euphemism for slavery in the pre-Civil War era. Let’s just say that, at least in Los Angeles, the Huntington is a unique institution. It has only around half the visitors each year that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or the Getty does, and—the unique aspect—the Huntington seems content with that. It is an unapologetically elitist institution whose exhibitions are, at their best, not blockbusters but intelligent and lucid explorations of difficult subjects. “A Strange and Fearful Interest,” mounted from the Huntington collection by the Library’s curator of photography, Jennifer Watts, is a prime example.
The title is a quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., made after an 1862 trip to Maryland to find his son, who had been shot through the neck in the Battle of Antietam. In a single day, the combined casualties were almost 23,000 men, with 3,500 killed outright. It wasn’t uncommon for family members to rush to battlegrounds lest their men lie untended in field hospitals or their corpses lay putrefying where they fell. Oliver, Jr. had suffered a chest wound in 1861 at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff and would be shot in the foot at Chancellorsville in 1863; after recuperating at home, he returned to his regiment all three times.
The exhibition title is drawn from Oliver, Sr.’s 1863 observation that “photography is extending itself to embrace subjects of strange and sometimes of fearful interest,” which is another period euphemism, this one inspired by an 1862 exhibition held at Mathew Brady’s New York gallery. Before civilians like Holmes, Sr. arrived, Brady staff photographer Alexander Gardner was at Antietam. Photography wasn’t nimble enough to compete with the sketch artists sent by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated and other publications to draw while the battles raged. The slow exposures and the bulky equipment that Gardner and his team had to deploy limited them to the battle’s aftermath, which included not only nature blown to splinters but the dead where they fell. Because unmoving, the corpses were a subject as irresistible as it was horrific.
And these pictures of the dead were included in Brady’s exhibition. The Huntington exhibition has a separate room, its walls a deep purple-black, devoted to Antietam photographs that Brady displayed. Whereas the public knew published sketches of battles were impressionistic fictions, these photographs were unassuageable facts. The New York Times reported that it was almost as if Brady had “brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets”; repulsive as they are, the newspaper admitted, the pictures have “a terrible fascination,” making it hard to turn away. Such photographs sold briskly throughout the war, as the Huntington acknowledges by displaying album pages of them.
Alexander Gardener, Completely Silenced! Dead Confederate Artillery Men, As they lay around their battery after the Battle of Antietam, September 1862 More than any other single revelation, these photographs contradicted the dreams of glory with which the war had begun, the vision of men leading a cavalry charge with swords drawn. The Civil War was the first in which the slaughter had become mechanized. At Gettysburg the year after Antietam, the casualties more than doubled to 53,000, in three days. North and South alike had thought the war would be concluded within months rather than the years for which it dragged on, ultimately taking a toll, between the carnage and the disease, of more Americans than all other wars from the Revolution through the Korean War combined.
The Huntington exhibition abounds in all the media by which images were distributed during the war, from a crude wanted poster for the Lincoln Conspirators to a “line and stipple artist’s proof” of a John Batchelder print after an Alonzo Chappell painting, from published sketches of Antietam battlefields copied from photographs to a collage of printed, handwritten and photographic material exposing the Confederate brutalities inflicted on prisoners of war at Andersonville. The Bowie knife with which assassin Lewis Powell attacked Secretary of State William Seward is also on display. But in both their numbers and their effect, it is the photographs that predominate.
Lithographs of A Soldier’s Grave or Lincoln’s assassination illustrate the artistic liberties taken in that medium; the grave scene is greeting-card maudlin, the assassination an image showing Lincoln shot in the wrong side of his head as Booth performs a plié leaping onto the stage. Photography, on the other hand, contained the dialectically opposed realities of the war. Besides being the public acknowledgement of the shocking human toll the war took, photography provided the private mementos that soldiers and their families cherished–the pictures of themselves that men left behind or of their wives and children that they carried into battle tucked inside their uniforms. Each of these functions, both as concrete documentation of mass destruction and a reminder of personal sentiments, reinforced the other. Each threw into relief the other side of the contradiction—the death grip—in which the entire nation was locked.
Unidentified tintypist, Portrait of Mrs. Frederick (Marie) Ockershauser, c. 1861, Images courtesy of Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. The exhibition is rich in examples of the second type of photograph as well as the first. An unknown drummer boy in an 1863 daguerreotype stands behind his mother with his hand on her shoulder. His is a standard pose, but one customarily assumed by a husband with his wife, suggesting that this boy must now be the man in his family. Or consider Frederick Ockerhauser’s tintype of his wife. She had embroidered the leather slipcase that protected the portrait when he took it with him to the war, but only the cased tintype came back home again.
As either a document or a memento, a photograph is a stoical object. As if to countermand his father’s characterization of photographs of war as “strange and fearful,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. characterized the experience of war as “horrible and dull.” The latter term suggests the slogging repetitiousness of campaigning. Like photography, language was affected by the war. American prose was transformed forever, as Gary Wills has pointed out, by a three-minute speech Lincoln gave at Gettysburg. But in the short term, I wonder whether the war didn’t degrade language as well—whether speech itself didn’t become a kind of mechanical device, one more like a gun than a camera.
The coup de grace delivered to the Confederacy came from repeating rifles issued to Union troops, an innovation that increased exponentially the murderousness of combat. It’s odd how pointlessly repetitious some last words noted in the exhibition were, too. When Booth was caught and shot by the soldiers dispatched to hunt him down, his last words were, “Useless, useless”; and when his accomplice Powell was caught, he screamed, “I’m mad! I’m mad!” Then there’s the refrain to which Walt Whitman was driven when he tried to sum up the war in 1865: “the dead, the dead, the dead, the dead” was all he could say. The war was so horrible that it left people gibbering, or speechless. Only photographs could tell the horror of it all without being injured by the telling itself.
Just as the ubiquity of pornography in our own age has numbed our ability to respond to the nude figure in art, female or male, so has tabloid sensationalism deadened our response to death itself after seeing in the news media bodies ranging from victims of automobile accidents to the victims of genocide. The value of the Huntington’s exhibition is to remind us of a time when photography of a certain kind was new and the shock of such images had not yet worn off. The exhibition re-contextualizes for us not just the photographs, but shared emotions they evoked for which we no longer have a reference or even, perhaps, a capacity.
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All over the map
Early in her career, Joyce Kozloff gained prominence on both coasts. Here in Los Angeles, as one of the organizers of the 1971 protest of LACMA’s white-male-dominated exhibition record, she became an early proponent of feminist art. Four years later, she joined Miriam Schapiro, Bob Zakanitch and a handful of other artists to found the Pattern and Decoration movement in New York. In the late 1970s, Kozloff crossed the high art/low art divide when she began painting on tiles instead of canvas. She went on to spend two decades engaged in public art, creating tile-based walls, plazas, and subway stations across the United States and abroad. (Southern California readers will be most familiar with her tiled plaza las Fuentes in Pasadena and her metro stop at 7th and Flower in Los Angeles.) Kozloff segued from public art back to studio work, using maps to make powerful political statements about imperialism and warfare. Most recently, she has turned her eclectic, trans-media eye to Chinatown kitsch, the Ebstorf Map, and vintage French school maps.
Kozloff has been exhibiting regularly, to remarkable critical acclaim, for more than four decades. I spoke to her twice, in July via telephone from her New York studio and September when she came to CB1 Gallery in downtown LA, where she has a show planned for January–February 2013.
BETTY ANN BROWN: Kozloff may be best known as one of the founders of the Pattern and Decoration Movement. I ask her to speak about it.
JOYCE KOZLOFF: It was New York, 1975. Miriam Schapiro invited me to a meeting at Bob Zakanitch’s loft. There were several other people there, including art writer Amy Goldin and artists Tony Robbin and Robert Kushner. Later, there were more meetings and more people joined us.I was excited about two discussions in those early meetings: one, that we were defining ourselves in opposition to the dominant minimalist style; and two, that all of us were exploring the impact of non-Western art.
When we began getting a lot of attention, I went around the country giving lectures on the movement. Often, there were weavers and potters in the audience. I thought we were paying homage [to their art forms], breaking down the barriers [between high art and low art]. But again and again, they said, Yeah, but you’re still making paintings. Why don’t you weave baskets? Or whatever.
I heard it so many times. Then one day I really heard it and decided I must begin working in the decorative arts. I couldn’t justify the ideology of breaking down the hierarchy by simply incorporating decorative motifs into painting any longer.
Joyce Kozloff, Social Studies: La Chine, 2012 I point out that she paints now.
I’ve always painted. Whether I paint on tiles or on canvas, the brush has been my primary tool. However, I stopped painting on canvas in 1977 and worked in other media for 20 years. Now I paint on canvas. I also paint on panels, paper and fabric. I draw and do collage. For me, there are no hierarchies among media. I don’t call myself a painter. I call myself an artist.The recent, more politically engaged work has a different kind of content than the pattern-based work of the 1970s and ’80s. I ask Kozloff to talk about that shift.
I’ve always been a political artist. For me, the decorative work was political and provocative. People are not offended by it now, but they were at the time.I sent my first decorative painting [Three Facades (1973)] to [New York gallerist] Tibor de Nagy and he hung it in a back room. One day, he told me Clement Greenberg had been in and said it looked like ladies’ embroidery. Tibor’s hands were shaking and his voice was quivering when he [told me] this, and he sent the piece back to my studio. Tibor exhibited the painting once he got used to it, but at that time, Greenberg’s formalist ideology was still quite powerful.
Kozloff focused on public art from 1983 through 2003. I ask her what initiated the move from public art back to the studio.
When I was doing public art, I hand-painted all the tiles. Each project would take over my life for a year. Meanwhile, I had other ideas, but I never had time to get to them…For every public art project, I was given floor plans or blueprints of the site. I saw the plans as the scaffolding of the building; the art I layered onto them was the skin. One day it occurred to me that this could be an interesting process for my private work. Soon after, I began to copy city maps from atlases, weaving into them ideas and images that I associated with those places.
Joyce Kozloff, Europe (detail), 2012 The mapping work takes time. If you’re an MTV person, you may not get it, because you may not spend enough time with it.
I’ve seen people come into one of my shows, where there’s a lot of very, very dense work, glaze over and walk out. Other people will stand in front of each piece and really look at it.We’ve grown up thinking that political art looks a certain way, black and white, or expressionistic and harsh, and my work isn’t like that. Unless you come up close, you may not even see the politics. It might look pretty or decorative—that’s my aesthetic—so there’s something dissonant there.
I ask Kozloff about China is Near (2010), which exists as original artworks and a related book.
I was planning to travel the Silk Road in China with two friends, but my brother became terminally ill and I didn’t want to be far away. So I started walking to Chinatown, which is a few blocks from my house.The title of the series comes from Marco Bellocchio’s film La Cina é vicina, which is not about China but about Marxists in Rome. My own work is not about China, but about Chinatowns.
I began by copying maps of the Silk Road out of books—the books I had bought for my travels. I added collage elements like cut-tissue papers from China. Then I bought my first camera—I never took photographs before and don’t know if I will again—and shot the pictures in Chinatown. And I downloaded and printed from Google maps all the places in the world called China. The series is a combination of collage, drawing, photographs, and those Google maps.
I mention Barthes’ Empire of Signs, which is about the Western idea of Japan, just as her work is about the Western idea of China.
I loved Barthes’ book. I also read about Chinatowns when I was doing the series. Chinatown as a concept was invented in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. The Chinese community wanted to make something that would be commercially viable and deter discrimination. It was a big success. And it’s been copied all over the world. Someone told me they’re making a Chinatown theme park in China now.China is near. China is everywhere.
Joyce Kozloff, China_Michoacan_Mexico, 2010 I ask her what came after China is Near.
I did this big painting JEEZ (2012). Marcia Kupfer, an expert in medieval maps, spoke to me about the Ebstorf Map. The original was 12 feet in diameter, so I made my piece at that scale, in 36 two-foot square sections. I quickly realized that the body of Christ was embedded in the map. So I Googled Jesus images: Jesus gay, Jesus Asian, Jesus African, Jesus as a woman, and a plethora of stuff came out. Ultimately, I added over a hundred images to the piece—everything from Old Masters to kitsch. I loved working on it; I think it’s very funny.I ask her how it felt to work on Jesus, since she came from a Jewish background.
In my hometown, we were practically the only Jewish family. Everyone else was Catholic. When I started working on JEEZ, I thought, oh my God, this guy has been with me all my life, everywhere I looked. My first love when I started studying art seriously was the Italian Renaissance and there’s a preponderance of Renaissance imagery in JEEZ. I didn’t do justice to it. But I certainly didn’t degrade it.The piece is also my response to what is going on politically in this country. The escalating rhetoric of religion in our political life is disgusting to me, particularly the imposition of Christianity. Jeez was my way of dealing with that.
Finally, the most recent body of work, Social Studies.
I found these French school maps at a flea market in Paris. They were printed in the 1950s and early 1960s. They depict different countries and continents, as well as different regions of France. They’re very charming, with animals, plants, factories, and people on them.This summer, I worked with Fran Flaherty in Carnegie Mellon’s new digital print lab. We scanned the existing maps and layered new content onto them. I wanted to introduce subjects that might not be taught in geography or history classes, and to question the way children are educated. There’s information about elections, about history, about native populations, about natural resources, about wars. There are 17 in the series. We printed them digitally, at 36” x 30” in editions of five each.
The series is rich and dense, a great way to pictorialize the intersections of history and geography. I ask her where the work will go now.
Who knows? I may take the school maps in a completely different direction.Who knows, indeed? With an artist whose vision ranges over such large, complex territories, there is no way to predict where Kozloff’s oeuvre will travel next.
Joyce Kozloff in her New York studio. -
Seeing The Big Picture
Stanley Kubrick’s filmmaking career begins and ends in a mood of urban claustrophobia—at its earliest stages, gritty and almost inarticulate, yet full of expression; at the end, almost hyper-articulate yet inchoate; refined, even rarefied, yet darkly, mortally carnal, unfolding its waking-unconscious narrative in a space that is as simultaneously closed and expansive as its protagonist’s mind. Over the course of 50 years of developing and directing films, Kubrick was to open and physically amplify those spaces, casting ever wider lenses in every direction to the sky and beyond.
Many of those same lenses are displayed in a vitrine in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Stanley Kubrick” exhibition, which originated at Frankfurt’s Deutsches Filmmuseum. Although they may be of more interest to film professionals, they are not incidental here. At the risk of legitimizing a battered and near-meaningless phrase of some currency in media circles, no one understood the “optics” of a situation—in every sense—better than Kubrick did. Beyond understanding how perceptions were shaped was his understanding of how every aspect of their representation shaped story and outcome. Whether in a chiaroscuro, half-tone world of black and white and hazy grays, or sanguineous and richly saturated color, Kubrick’s films show us matters of sense and sensibility trumping abstract notions of order, perspective, control, belief; the whole contained and magnified by the story moving across the screen. What remains consistent through these very distinct films, is a preoccupation with the juxtapositions and intersections of interior and exterior spaces, and parallel to that, physical and psychological spaces. In Kubrick’s movies, we are always acutely aware of how where and what the characters see condition the way they see, and vice-versa.
Kubrick’s gift for grafting a dramaturgy of space and perspective to the dramaturgy of script and performance was unique. There is a stunning economy, almost bluntness, of character development evident from the earliest of Kubrick’s films to the very end. Kubrick understood the craft of photo profile and essay from his years as a staff photographer for Look magazine; and there is a quality at the core of several, if not all, Kubrick films that hearkens back to magazine-style photojournalism. Kubrick uses the body language of the characters in relation to their space to both articulate character sensibility and development and their relationships with each other. The characters in Killer’s Kiss (1955) might be shadow puppets. The dialogue and character exposition range from the schematic to almost hilariously blunt to psycho-absurd; but, in almost perfect sync with gesture and movement, the film story holds us with its drive and urgency.
In Paths of Glory (1957), set against the backdrop of World War I, human conflict is plotted out against variously social, ceremonial, strategic and mechanical spaces. In the opening scene, set within the drawing room of a grand chateau, Kubrick choreographs one general cagily circling (and ensnaring) another in what amounts to a martial minuet, as they discuss a maneuver that will cost the lives of hundreds of their soldiers. The forthright Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) does not linger in this space—or any other—but, framed by barracks and trenches, moves relentlessly forward into a backtracking camera.
Breaking Lolita (1962) out of the head of its narrator, Humbert Humbert, involved similar cinematic choreography—counterpointing Humbert’s interior monologue with his various pas de deux and trois with Lolita, her mother Charlotte, and the enigmatic Clare Quilty. Here (as if the screenwriting services of Vladimir Nabokov were not enough), Kubrick was aided by another kind of cinematic trick: genius casting. In addition to Sue Lyon’s revelatory performance in the title role as an American suburban “nymphet,” and the note-perfect performances of James Mason and Shelley Winters in the roles of Humbert and Charlotte, Kubrick was afforded the services of another genius, Peter Sellers, as the chameleon Quilty. From Quilty’s disheveled mansion to suburban interiors and backyards, to the open road, to the revelation of the character of Lolita herself, Kubrick foregrounds frank yet guileless American corruption against a receding horizon of betrayed idealism and false (European) cultural pretensions.
Kubrick would deploy Sellers for another triple impersonation in Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Here, Kubrick shows us a ship of state turned ship of fools, a synoptic view of man’s fate rendered tragic-comically absurd. Sellers is variously angel/handmaiden to the incapacitated (as Mandrake), agent of inefficacy (as President Muffley), and agent of doom (Strangelove). In the Ken Adam-designed War Room with its halo of light bathing the circled desks and soaring raked walls with strategic maps tracking SAC deployments, as the world closes in on its masters, Muffley dissolves into the light, while Strangelove wheels around seemingly out of nowhere—an anti-Christ manifesting from the void—the same void through which Slim Pickens as Major Kong will ride his nuclear warhead to bright oblivion.
The troubled spaceship, “Discovery 1,” in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), under the stewardship of another dubious (and similarly constituted) trio, might be considered another kind of ship of fools. Here, within astonishingly realistic sets, including a rotating centrifuge, Kubrick documents the tasks and activities of his astronauts Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Bowman (Keir Dullea), including their interactions with the HAL-9000 computer (voiced by Douglas Rain) through which, in tandem with earth-based command operations, virtually all of the vessel’s functions are managed and run.
But within the arc of Kubrick’s Odyssey, which after all takes us back to the dawn of humankind and fast-forward (via “stargate”) to another sort of dawn, Discovery’s troubles amount to a sideshow—however elaborate and richly informative, critical to this particular dramaturgy of space.
In 2001, the human relationship to space—from the microscopic to the cosmic—would seem to be at the heart of the film’s subject matter. But more central to Kubrick’s concerns here are the ways humankind orders space, our extensions into space, and the attenuation of our relations to these extensions over time and distance—and by implication, to each other.
There is a break here, left unresolved by Bowman’s emergence into the Louis XVI-classical space of his observation chamber, his transfiguration via yet another vessel—the “amniotic” sac of the Star Child.
Some of these issues are foreshadowed in Kubrick’s earlier films: the inventory and ordering of human thought; the protocols seemingly dictated by mechanistic feedback. (E.g., in Strangelove, the operation of the Doomsday Machine; Muffley’s attempt to placate the Russian premier’s inebriated pouting at the protocols of the hotline: “Of course I like to say, ‘hello,’ Dimitri.”; Mandrake’s desperate attempt to tease out the return command code.) Kubrick would weigh these issues in another far more dystopic futuristic context in his film based on Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1971). More than Kubrick’s preceding (or later) films, the surrealistic visual style of Clockwork is identifiably of its time (though as always, Kubrick is ahead of the pack—consider that Scorcese’s Taxi Driver was released five years later). Here, a swinging welfare state incarnation of the U.K. (tailor-made for a Thatcherite campaign ad) is the backdrop for a counterculture of wanton gratification and sociopathic violence amongst a balkanized but empowered welfare class with time on its hands and vivid comic-book imaginations.
Without setting aside concerns central to his prior films, in Clockwork, Kubrick moves beyond a straightforward spatial choreography to a fluid and versatile style beautifully adapted to the post-Pop landscape that had evolved between the time Burgess published his novel and when filming began. In Clockwork, Kubrick has already leapt beyond that landscape to what we now recognize as Postmodernism. Its influence can be seen in everything from music video to Japanese anime to (in its lowest common mass-dilution) Apatovian freaks, geeks and superannuated lost boys.
Although Kubrick yearned to return to the “big canvas” of a historical picture, his difficulties financing a long-planned Napoleon project, turned him toward a more intimate novel set against the panorama of 18th-century Britain and Europe, William Thackeray’s Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. Here, Redmond Barry’s progress from Irish adventurer to baronial seat to forlorn exile unfolds against landscapes and interiors deliberately intended to evoke Gainsborough, Chardin and Menzel. Adapting lenses used by space discovery missions to cameras once used for background film, Kubrick shows us the world Barry sees and moves through—in natural light, the filtered daylight from the windows of high-ceilinged great halls, and candlelit drawing rooms. There are no feints or sideshows here. Kubrick has even substituted a narrator for Barry’s first-person voice. Instead, the pictures are allowed to tell the entire story—set magnificently to music by Bach, Mozart, and, most famously, the Handel D-minor Sarabande and Schubert E-flat piano trio. Music literally underscores what Kubrick commits and resigns us to—Barry’s quest for some purchase on his fate and his inexorable surrender to it.
Barry Lyndon is a pivotal moment in Kubrick’s career—as dark as its candlelit salons. In no other Kubrick film are we left with a comparable sense of the futility of human agency. Even Jack (Jack Nicholson) is ultimately recomposed into the “big picture”—repossessed by the world of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980). Private Joker (Matthew Modine), the reluctant killer, survives and moves on, his humanity marginally intact, which, in the context of Full Metal Jacket (1987), is saying a lot.
LACMA’s Kubrick exhibition sprawls between the foyer and the adjoining plaza-level galleries of its Art of the Americas building, but has a resonance and coherence that accords with the issues and concerns that thread through these very distinct pictures. Walking between the installations built around various props, stills and transparencies, clips, documentation and paraphernalia, the viewer has the sense of moving between rooms marked by formative incident or heightened awareness—which is true to the experience of the films. Caught up in the dramatic and affective themes and motives of the individual films, we may be less conscious of what they present in their totality—which is nothing less than a history of late 20th-century consciousness.
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Juan Capistran
“White Riot…be the beacon, be the light. KO’d by love” seduces with its elegance then simultaneously puts one off and seduces a second time with its literary and other cultural presumptions. Not pretensions: we can see that Capistran is intimate with these literary (and pop culture) references. (LA viewers may recall the break dance he performed on a Carl Andre in the 2008 LACMA “Phantom Sightings” show.) Capistran has had similar engagements with, among other divergent facets of the cultural mainstream, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Led Zeppelin, Black Flag and Sister Sledge.
The show’s title is an almost infuriating mash-up of references. In a gallery become seemingly a chamber of visual white noise, we get that it’s coming from a place both beyond comprehensive grasp and radiant, with an illumination borne out of something very dark. The show consists of five photographs of objects chosen with deliberately political intent. Two are ambiguously cubical objects presented in flat, foreshortened orthogonals in a white field; another (flatter still), a placard in a slightly half-tone gray-white field; another a ghostly Molotov cocktail, a broken semi-lunar ellipse describing its base, with its faintly articulated body eliding into the white background; another, necessarily the most clearly articulated among the group, a clenched fist that might be a power salute, also “whited out.” On closer inspection, one of the cubical objects turns out to be a brick; the other, a pamphlet or booklet, which as it turns out is none other than Mao’s famous “Red Book”—painted white.
Capistran’s focus here, both formally and philosophically, is the liminal domain between conscious apprehension and comprehension or intention; the intersection—suggested by the Hawthorne passage from which he takes his titles—of memory, anticipation, desire, active consideration. The objects simultaneously emerge from and sink or fade into an abyss. But the work clings to its apprehensiveness in every sense. Capistran seems intent on focusing the viewer’s eye/mind on both confrontation and evasion. The whitewash fades into ink-stained, even blood-stained actualities, as on one of two prism-shaped columnar objects displaying a cloth “object,” folded like a flag and wearing a button “Till the razor cuts.” The white pedestal that lifts its white cloth banner is the central pivot of the show, none other than a black anarchist flag that has been bleached.
But Capistran seems to be reaching for something even larger—hence the self-consciously literary titles. Into the “intermediate” liminal space of Hawthorne’s “The Haunted Mind” comes “a funeral train” laden with the freight of Capistran’s parenthetical subtitles: “Passion and Feeling” (the brick); “Sorrow” (the bottle); “Hope turned to Disappointment” (the protest sign). The ‘power salute’ (“Shame”) comes closest to an actual response to the text: a waking conscience firmly asserting the fiction of innocence.
Can there be a romantic undercurrent to this austerity? You have to wonder with a title for the cloth and pedestal like “…when darkness has swallowed the reality…there is a light that never goes out…” The second half is not Hawthorne; and although I’m not going to say what I think it is, there’s something darkly romantic in it; and I think we all know that song.
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Michael Light
Michael Light has been shooting photographs of the western U.S. landscape for over 20 years. They are generally taken from a small light airplane that he flies himself, and explore the majesty of these vast and variegated lands, creating dense patterns akin to abstract art. At the same time, many sites reveal details about our use of the land showing it to be anything but a beautiful or intangible design. While Light himself steers clear of moralizing about how and why the land is tilled, mined, tunneled, poisoned, drained of resources or riveted with abandoned artifacts, the viewer can infer Light’s extended considerations about what is going on out of sight in the immense hinterlands of the West. His current exhibition “Idaho, Two Sublimes,” places rather different takes on Idaho side by side as a way of bracketing the artist’s overarching photo project.
The “Sawtooth Mountains; Stanley, Idaho” series (2009) of large-scale black-and-white prints is aligned with a study of romantic beauty, a romanticism that is generated by the sheer scale depicted and the kinship to landscape painters such as Caspar David Friedrich or Albert Bierstadt. The closely cropped images have no horizon line, since they are viewed from above, and alternate between jagged, flattened modernist-like patterns and oddly displaced and weightless landmasses. The use of the stark black and white further skews a viewer’s ability to recognize the mountains. Light appears to employ this mental distance to suggest viewers look more closely. Beauty is central to his construction of meaning but throughout is his ability to cause skepticism and doubt.
Michael Light, Interchange of Highways 60 and 202 Looking West, Mesa, AZ, 2007. Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery. Works in his other series delve into human usage of the earth. The foregrounds center on outlying areas of our wilderness turned into places for dumping, storing and testing an incredibly messy and dangerous weapons system. Strangely iconic when seen from the sky, the circular and square buildings and connecting roadways that have been cut into the land almost turn into emblems or talismans, beautiful in their own right. Once abandoned, however, they look more like scar tissue on the earth than a symbolic beacon of ongoing societal or industrial progress. Light provides us with a tangible reminder that off in the distance and out of view, the military industrial complex is busy turning the wheels of its bellicose enterprise, churning up the earth in its path.
Michael Light’s double take hinges on our moving back and forth between the stirring majesty of the one set of images and the history of destruction the other recounts. The power of his images reside in the mixture of surface beauty and depth of truth he discovers. Implicitly sharing the company of photographers such as Richard Misrach, collectives such as CLUI, and activists such as EcoFlight, he moves us to examine and critically account for our world.
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Kerry Tribe
In her current work, Kerry Tribe appropriates content from Hollywood films, specifically those shot at the Greystone mansion in Beverly Hills, piecing together dialogue culled from over 60 films. “There Will Be ” features the 30-minute original film Greystone, as well as a shorter video Bibliography, photographs of the bloodied actors, and works on paper that read like concrete poetry featuring lines taken from the scripts used to compile Greystone.
Greystone Mansion was the most expensive residence in California when it was built in 1929 and is imbued with its own intriguing history. It was the site of the murder that same year of its owner, Edward Doheny Jr. and his personal secretary Hugh Plunkett. The circumstances of the deaths were never solved and at the time it was widely speculated as to whether it was a double murder or murder/suicide.
Aware of the aura of mystery surrounding the Greystone mansion, Tribe researched its history. She has meticulously crafted a script that weaves together both well known and little known films that were shot on location in its various rooms. The mansion functions as the set, and is the only constant in the project, portrayed as a silent holder of an unattainable truth.While strategies of appropriation have been in use by artists working in both film and photography for many years—like Christian Marclay’s culling of clips relating to time in The Clock (2011) and the proliferation of art made from YouTube videos in the manner of Natalie Bookchin’s “Now he’s out in public and everyone can see” (2012)—Tribe montages fragments of Hollywood cinema to explore an unsolved mystery. In Tribe’s live action film five different scenarios of the murder are depicted. Each scene was shot in the actual rooms where the murders occurred. The actors are dressed in period costume from the time of the original Greystone murder and perform stereotypical roles: the jilted lover, the maid, the inspector, the closeted homosexual. They recite lines of conversation that simultaneously propel the narrative forward, yet sometimes appear to be out of context. Tribe adapted the dialogue to create multiple points of view and to offer different possibilities as to who might have committed the murder and why.
Kerry Tribe, Joe, 2012. Courtesy of the 1301PE, photo by Fredrik Nilsen. Those with an encyclopedic knowledge of film may recognize both the settings and snippets of dialogue Tribe uses and be able to connect them back to the actual scenes. Without this knowledge, however, the work still resonates. In much the same way as she appropriates images and language, Tribe engages with Hollywood’s practice of endless recycling. The mansion eventually became a popular location appearing as the backdrop for movies including Eraserhead, There Will be Blood, The Social Network and The Big Lebowski. In Tribe’s meta-narrative “There Will Be ” she both critiques and embraces the myths of Hollywood and the ability of a dynamic medium like film to be a purveyor of truth.
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Ed Moses
In the city of the dubious “angel” we all embrace our icons, whether dead or alive, real or imagined. And if not all the time, then certainly when they deliver to us a newly birthed, risky body of work. Ed Moses has done just that with “New Works: The Crackle Paintings” at Patrick Painter, and while the paintings do at times alternately bristle and breathe, fissure and reattach, ultimately the visual trope is played out as though Moses’ central motivation for creating these strangely static works was decorative rather than, as per his usual aesthetic, aggressively and gloriously experimental. Still, many of the paintings do manage to catapult out at the viewer, only to draw back in again as though one were witnessing a sudden explosion and the inevitable settling of sediment.
The paintings in this exhibition emphasize a sweeping color palette from ominous, lusterless blacks to voluptuous pinks and vibrant golds. Moses utilizes his crackle methodology as a means of breaking up the picture plane, separating the background color from the more aggressive gestural embellishments that are overlaid to comprise the central imagery. His instincts are for the most part sincere; however, works like White Over Black (all works 2012) run the risk of falling short of high art, only to be reclassified as decorative tableau painting, or in league with a shabby chic mentality. Other paintings have more evident pulse and vitality.
In a recent interview, Moses admitted that the process by which these images came into being was partially an accident. The swirling, spiraling effect found in many of these images had its inception in a mishap where Moses tripped, and falling onto the canvas, created an impression with his elbow, which he then recognized as a discovery within the work. Many of the paintings in the exhibition, including Black Over Bronze, contain this circular gesture, and these are by far the most successful works. The impetus for movement appears more organic and fully realized as the bronze underpainting takes on the effect of skin, breaking open and peeling away, revealing a more violent undercurrent. The same is true of Red Over Black where the colors appear more stylized and far less decorative, as if the relationship between the two shades and the shapes they create is somehow necessary, even inevitable. The suggestion of some kind of obsessive violence exists, or perhaps an awareness of mortality, the crumbling and falling away of the physical body. Regardless, these swirling, intoxicating shapes seem vital and all of a piece.
The more brightly colored images—the electric pinks and greens—appear less convincing, perhaps due to the fact these colors bring to mind a psychedelic mind warp or Easter bunnies, or rolling hills of plastic grass. The best work in this show is grounded in the body—sanguine reds and ominous blacks. Moses obviously has a love affair with the color red, and this unbridled obsession gives the work its breadth, power and distinction.
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Marfa Girl
For a man who had just won the grand prize at the Rome film festival last month, Larry Clark was in a cranky mood. As he took to the stage to receive the Best Film award for Marfa Girl, his acceptance speech veered into a rant: “I’ve been fucked by everybody in Hollywood,” Clark announced to the bejeweled closing gala audience. “In Hollywood things don’t always work out” translated the unflappable interpreter for the Italian audience. “I’ve been fucked by producers and distributors and everyone that looks you straight in the eye and shakes your hand and lies to you,” the director continued, as he explained why this film will be viewable exclusively as paid stream ($5.95) via his official website: larryclark.com. “This is the future and the future is now…So all of us old farts who are crying about 35mm: ‘oh my God film is dead…’ well you can either die with it or you can move forward and I’m moving forward and I’m gonna be with the kids.” Yes, the kids, always the kids.
Mercedes Maxwell and Adam Mediano between takes. Photo by Morgan Jenkins. In this instance the photographer/director frames his band of photogenic stoners and skaters on the backdrop of the unlikely hick/art-colony town of Marfa. The hard scrabble, West Texas hamlet that became a desert destination for artists and New York-types after Donald Judd purchased several buildings there in ’71 to show his sculptures. Marfa Girl is ostensibly in part about the awkward cohabitation of hipster and hick in this windswept trailer park-artist colony. As the film opens a couple of Latino stoner teens are smoking a joint next to the train depot when they are set upon by border patrol agents. The one who gets thrown in the police car and driven home to his hippie single mom is Adam, played by actual Hispanic skater kid and Marfa resident Adam Mediano, whom Clark credits for inspiring the film after their chance encounter a year ago. The rest of the movie unspools from there with the barest of plots. Basically Adam and his buds smoke dope, play in a band, score some more weed, hang out, get regularly harassed by Homeland Security agents that apparently have little else to do, and bum around at each others houses. There are chicks too, girlfriends, skater groupies, young single moms, New Age types and the titular girl (Drake Brunette) a 20-something art student whose residency at the Judd Foundation apparently involves a lot of hanging out, drawing and/or fucking young boys, with a preference for the latter. In the meantime Adam is pretty busy getting busy with his girlfriend Erica and older woman/single mom Donna (Indigo Rael) whose boyfriend is away for a stretch in the big house. Behind the sexual ennui is the suggestion of social commentary: “Marfa, Texas is kind of a microcosm of what’s going on in the country,” said Clark in Rome, “there’s a lot of racism there against Hispanics, against brown people. It’s a town that’s kinda like a throwback to the ’50s, where they still paddle kids in high school.” Yep and you know there’s a paddling scene in the film although it’s more like a spread from Spanking magazine than an indictment of educational abuse. To be fair, this is not social filmmaking; it’s Larry Clark, and the “political” elements are broadly sketched, basically the hippies and kids vs. the “bad lieutenant” border agents who are also mostly Latino (Marfa Girl engages the agents debate on border protection and race identity—before dropping acid with them for a night of psychedelic sex and merry miscegenation). As Clark explained to Italian Rolling Stone: “[in Marfa] Artists, Mexicans, cops, cowboys. They all get stoned and fuck each other.”
Yes, in case you haven’t heard, Larry Clark is big on fucking, and teenagers. And big on teenagers fucking. But is it art? Well, yes, it is. And even with a penchant toward glamour shots that occasionally gets in the way, Clark is nothing if not coherent with his vision as he gazes on these marginal human landscapes, creating a poetic space out of adolescent indolence. Oh and he’s got a chip on his shoulder, especially about the principal of his star’s high school who nixed his travel to Rome in the company of such a “perv” director. “Now I’ve never met this woman and she stopped Adam at the last minute from coming and it would have been the experience of his lifetime; a 16-year-old that’s never been out of Texas. And this woman slandered me and stopped him from coming. Now Will Rogers said ‘I never met a man I didn’t like’ and my inspiration, Lenny Bruce, said ‘I never met a dyke I didn’t like,’ and I never met this woman and…and…Fuck her!” concluded Clark as the festival director visibly fidgeted at his side. “I do not agree with her position” recited the official interpreter. We can only surmise what Sen. Chris Dodd, president of the MPAA and esteemed guest of the festival sitting in the audience must have thought of this particular American triumph.
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The Low Road
The downtown art scene in New York City has a long and illustrious history that can hardly be contained in any one exhibition. Yet the New Museum’s “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery 1969–1989” makes it possible to say a great many things. Organized by Ethan Swan, “Come Closer” is about the many individual forms of expression that included the active and sometimes volatile downtown New York scene of the ’70s and ’80s. It is also about the individuals who made these statements, about the timbre of their shared existence, and how we may celebrate the real and mythical proximity between them.
The exhibition actually emerged out of a more extensive project called the “Bowery Artist Tribute” which so far has comprised three printed publications, a film, and an interactive website from which anyone can travel along the length of the Bowery, starting at Canal Street and ending at the corner of 4th Avenue and 10th Street, clicking along the way links to read histories of who lived there. Out of all these inhabitants, Swan selected the work of 15 artists: Barbara Ess, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Keith Haring, John Holmstrom, Curt Hoppe, Colette Lumiere, Marc H. Miller, Adrian Piper, Adam Purple, Dee Dee Ramone, Joey Ramone, Marcia Resnick, Bettie Ringma, Christy Rupp, Arleen Schloss, Charles Simonds, Eve Sonneman, Billy Sullivan, Paul Tschinkel, Anton van Dalen, Arturo Vega, Robin Winters, and Martin Wong.
Entering the gallery one is faced with a variety of documents, ephemera, and only a few actual art works. Directly across from the elevator is Study for La Vida (1984) by Martin Wong, whose retrospective graced the reopening of the Broadway location of the museum itself after an extended remodeling in 1998. This single painting presents us with a close-up view of working class families in every window of a red brick tenement building, framed by curved window apertures lacking panes and the enclosure of the fire escape. The unadorned surface of the building is knobby and mottled, like skin, and Wong uses it as both a backdrop and a framing device, making a portrait of enforced solitude out of a portrayal of the social tension among neighbors in the same building. This is one concept of urban existence: what should be a home exists more like barracks or a jail cell. It only holds lives, but does not encourage them.
In direct contrast is Adrian Piper’s conceptual piece “Hypotheosis: Situation #11” in which the artist takes photographs of her studio/home, in particular of the time she sat in to make her work, and the photographs are then included in a graph which connects the real objects to their role in the greater domestic space. She goes into detail with descriptions such as: “…the series of photographs documenting my own spatiotemporal passage through a situation, the accompanying short essay that explains the underlying philosophy of this work. Specific to each work is the actual situation or context I am registering: meditating, eating breakfast, reading the New York Review of Books, walking around a chair or through my loft, taking a walk outside…” In this way the artist attaches a maniacal degree of theorizing to every conscious action that makes up the structure of her day. We know she has a life, one that registers specifically in artistic terms, because the document of the artwork itself not only acts as evidence, but it also lays the groundwork for future days and moments to be revealed in a likewise fashion. It combines two types of communication: the intimate and the systematic. Piper wants to describe her life to us, alternating between the use of words and of direct connections planned out to show an archaeology of utility and its direct correlation to creative discovery. This is how the artist deals with the banality of existence.
Paul Tschinkel, Hannah’s Haircut (1975) Another conceptual work, also connected to the banal and the commonplace, but depicted on video, therefore dynamic and causal instead of theoretical and esoteric, is Paul Tschinkel’s Hannah’s Haircut (1975). The feminist artist Hannah Wilke is filmed topless giving Claes Oldenburg a haircut. The camera pans in close to Oldenburg’s face, with Wilke’s arms wrapped around him, her own dark tresses framing his giddy face and his half balding pate. Wilke is naked except for a pair of long black pants that match her hair, and her every gesture—though she is performing a duty traditionally reserved for men—evokes the desire men have for beautiful women while they themselves are in the middle of “beautifying” themselves. Wilke is in control here but she is never a threat to Oldenburg; she attends to him with due care, and is at moments even solicitous and affectionate. There are many symbolic levels within this film that may speak to a communication between the artistic practice of men versus women, of the stature of the male subject and his female interlocutor or opponent, or it may also be seen as a merging of different creative entities. We must remember that in the early 1960s, a generation before this, Oldenburg was not known for monumental soft sculptures or public commissioned artwork, but was in fact one of the progenitors of the Happening, a radical anti-theater which matched camp dullness and established a bellwether for new artistic practice. Oldenburg moons at the camera sheepishly and Wilke alternates between vamping it up and holding his head as if it were a big lollipop. Everyone who saw it probably wished they could get a haircut from Hannah…
Other artworks from “Come Closer” point to how artists were harvesting the abandoned territories of the downtown area. Adam Purple was a tall, shy hippie-type who wore all purple clothing, and rode around on a purple bike handing out purple pamphlets. He created his own version of eminent domain as Zen garden in “The Garden of Eden” (1975–86) made in concentric circles, including 45 fruit and nut trees, and growing to 15,000 square feet before being bulldozed by the city. Keith Haring was experimenting in sampling the modes of creative expression from abstraction as collage to his iconographic tagging that turned into paintings in subways, construction sheds, and on his very own apartment’s front door, which sits in the middle of the gallery.
Marc H. Miller, “Harry Mason, Harry’s Bar, 98 Bowery, c. 1974,” “Harold & I Are Waiting For 8 a.m. Ready To Open Up For Business.”, courtesy the New Museum, New York Marc H. Miller’s “Harry Mason, Harry’s Bar, 98 Bowery, c. 1974,” a series of Polaroid photographs with short, deadpan statements about their subject, a local bar owner whose personal history, and working class dress, paints him as a denizen of the pre-scene Bowery. Obviously he was a much-loved character, and Miller epitomizes him in every shot. From the way that Miller is posed in the first shot, it seems that he either worked at the bar, or was posing as a bar-back to insinuate himself into this rather matter of his down-at-the-heels art project. The titles are written onto the snapshots in the handwriting of their subject, as he matter-of-factly recounts the activities of a regular day: “Harold & I Are Waiting For 8 a.m. Ready To Open Up For Business.” “I Am Wiping The Bar.” “I Am Serving A Glass Of Beer To One Of My Customers.” Miller picked a very Clark Kent figure to mythicize a working guy, who does his job, loves his cat and takes naps sitting up. He is an old fashioned Bowery boy, like a character in a novel. Miller is adding to the quality of art practice while also creating oral history.
Some of the documents on display here are meant to give a feel for the experimental and DIY communal culture of the era and its varied milieu, including visual arts, poetry, punk rock, club culture, artists at salons and happenings in heir own spaces, getting ready to go out or arguing over artistic agendas, or merely standing inside looking out into the night. A series of slides taken by Billy Sullivan, “250 to 105 Bowery” (1978-89) attest to the social fabric of the time. There is also a collection by Alan Moore of “Ephemera from MWF Video Club” with assorted VHS tapes, newsletters, announcements, T-Shirts silkscreened by Arturo Vega, and a poster by Anton Van Dalen which shows a skeleton with two skulls, each head with the words “Heroin” and “Real Estate” and in large red capitals above: “THE TWO-HEADED MONSTER DESTROYS COMMUNITY.”
As a historical exhibition, “Come Closer” depends heavily upon the collection of the New Museum, especially in its use of marginal and ephemeral materials that actually look like they were taken out of an archive; and since the exhibition is housed on the educational area, it does not have a lot of floor or wall space to play with. In the place of Haring’s door, it would have been more interesting to see some of his early subway drawings, or at least one of the gallery-intended paintings he made later on. There are some elements of the exhibition that are charming, while other are merely cloying, such as Bettie Ringma’s group portrait of herself and The Ramones, or half-assed sketches by one of the band members, showing domestic scenes in which domesticity and parental authority are devoid. Self-portraiture as solipsistic narrative in a bunch of grimy black-and-white photographs does not stand up to the rigor or inventiveness of other works in the exhibition; down a hallway lit only by glaring fluorescent bulbs are screen prints of concert posters and graffiti on bare white opposing walls, giving a ghostly echo to the throwaway medium of public walls in the streets. We are left with a cumulative echo, and in listening to its refrain, only then do we come closer to what was gritty and magical about life around The Bowery.
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Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers,
In this issue of Artillery we’re featuring three stories on film. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t planned that way, but things just fell into place. Oddly enough, the three filmmakers represent a microcosm of hierarchical filmmaking. From acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick to indie filmmaker riding the crest, Mike Ott, with Larry Clark in the middle, a rebel artist finally getting his due with Best Film at the Rome Film Festival.To give you a glimpse into the editorial world at Artillery, everything was filed and ready to go to the designer when I woke up to a string of emails congratulating Larry Clark for his triumph in Rome. I went straight to YouTube and watched his acceptance speech. Our contributor Luca Celada happened to be in Italy, and yes, he did attend the festival awards, and yes he did in fact see Clark’s film, Marfa Girl. What luck! And such an extra bonus that Luca can interpret the Italian translator, euphemizing her way around all of Clark’s profanity. Hilarious.
But wait. This is an art magazine! You might ask why do we have three articles about film? Actually, we’ve been writing about film since our first volume. Our regular column about esoteric DVDs on the current market, Bunker Vision by Skot Armstrong, has been in the magazine from day one. And we had a Film & Art issue during our first year.Most artists and art-lovers are very much into the cinema and probably secretly dream about making their own films. An artist who works with the camera often fantasizes about putting all those pictures together to make a movie. It’s a very natural progression. And that has been Clark’s experience, since he first made an impact with Tulsa, his seminal book of gritty black-and-white photography, in 1971. Artists who combine imagery with narrative are natural candidates for having some kind of film in their repertoire—at the very least, one black-and-white Super 8 short.
Clearly, filmmaking is part of the “art” world. Many visual artists have worked in film: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Sharon Lockhart and Marnie Weber are a few LA artists that come to mind. But their films fall more into the category of experimental filmmaking with a very loose or nonexistent narrative. In other words, these films are not hot prospects for success in the commercial movie industry. Nevertheless, they are artists making films.
That said, the film industry per se doesn’t really interest me as material for Artillery. But here we are in Hollywood, and it just sort of creeps into the art world. We all wish Hollywood would pay a little more attention to the artists out there (as in taking advantage of—and paying for—the preeminent art Los Angeles has to offer). It’s pretty obvious how very little the film world knows or cares about how the art world really works. We see evidence of this whenever a movie attempts to portray an artist or the gallery system.
But the three film stories in this issue are about filmmakers who are artists with unique visions and aesthetics. And whether you’re making a film, writing a book, directing a TV sitcom or telling a joke, if it’s any good, if it’s creative, if it’s something you’ve never seen before, then it’s probably art. And that’s why it’s in Artillery.
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Mark Wallinger
YOU CAN TELL A GOOD DEAL ABOUT AN ARTIST FROM his studio. After I arrive at Mark Wallinger’s, in the buzzing heart of London’s Soho district, he pops out to buy a couple of cappuccinos before we settle down to do the interview, giving me a chance to nose around. His bookshelves contain an erudite mix, with the poems of John Ashbery wedged between James Joyce’s Ulyssesand Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Pinned to the walls are a couple of photographs of ears (left and right) and Rilke’s famous quote from the Duino Elegies: For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure.” There are photocopies of Velázquez’ scarlet-clad Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) that Wallinger used for his piece, I am Innocent” (2010)—an investigation into religious authority.
Reproductions of Titian’s Diana and Callisto and The Death of Actaeon (based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses) reference his most recent project at The National Gallery, part of an exhibition of contemporary responses” to the master, Metamorphosis: Titian 2012.” This exhibition reunites those two paintings for the first time since the 18th century. We also see works by leading British artists Chris Ofili, (up for the Turner Prize) and Conrad Shawcross, along with those by Wallinger for designs they created for newly commissioned Titian-inspired ballets at the Royal Opera House. These, in turn, generated scores by some of the country’s leading composers, as well as a collection of Titian-inspired poetry, with contributions from Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison and Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy. At the National Gallery Wallinger built a sealed room where the viewer was turned into a voyeur, a veritable Peeping Tom, encouraged to peer through broken glass panes and keyholes to catch a glimpse of a woman washing. There were fears it might encourage the heavy-breathing brigade. How long did his “Diana” have to be confined in this sealed gallery room, I ask. Oh, there were several of them working two-hour shifts,” he volunteers. Apart from Metamorphosis” it’s been a hectic year; he has had recent shows at the Baltic in Gateshead and at the new Turner Contemporary in Margate.
Since leaving his MA course at Goldsmiths College in 1985, his career has been on an upward trajectory. In 2004 he spent 10 nights in the Berlin contemporary, the Neue Nationalgalerie (he was living in the city at the time), dressed in a bear costume (the symbol of the city is a bear). After that he went on to produce a series of technically adroit oil paintings of the homeless and race horses (racing is a passion) and created the only religious public statue to appear in England since the Reformation, his life-sized Ecce Homo, a proletarian Christ created as part of the ongoing series of sculptures for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Then in 2007, he won the Turner Prize for his audacious recreation of the protest camp erected against the Iraq war outside the Houses of Parliament by the British peace campaigner, Brian Haw. Wallinger had been photographing Haw for a year before he made the piece and enjoys the irony that what was seen as an eyesore and an embarrassment in Parliament Square was worthy of a prize and serious critical analysis when placed in the marble Duveen Hall of Tate Britain. I mention Duchamp and how the gallery context defines a piece as a work of art.” Yes, there is a similarity,” he agrees, but Duchamp used readymades and this was a reconstruction.” In 2008 he went on to win the prestigious competition to erect Britain’s biggest figurative artwork, a giant white horse to welcome visitors on the Eurostar in Kent. But, for the moment, with the recession, it has been put on ice. And then there was a major monograph simply titled Mark,” published by Thames and Hudson.
As we settle down with our coffee I ask if he always wanted to be an artist. Ever since I was a kid,” he says. That’s really all I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time drawing. It was something of my own.” Did he have any idea what contemporary grown-up” artists did? Probably not. I just did what I was good at, what absorbed me, though as a child my parents took me to the National Gallery and the Tate.” Born in semi-rural Essex (just outside London) he came from a politically aware, left-wing family. His father protested in 1939 against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in Cable Street, a Jewish quarter of the London’s East End. Not moneyed, his parents nonetheless valued education. A clever kid, he got top grades at school and could easily have gone on to university. Instead he did an Art Foundation course at his local technical college. It was hard living at home when all my mates had started university.” But by 1986, at the age of just 26, he was having his first solo show in London, Hearts of Oak,” at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery (Reynolds remains his dealer). There, under the title Where There’s Muck There’s Brass” (an old Yorkshire expression eliding the notions of shit and money), he showed a painting that appropriated Thomas Gainsborough’s 1750s double portrait Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, which he executed on plywood sheets appropriated from Collet’s, the leftist bookshop on Charing Cross Road where he worked, in order to explore issues of the English class system during the Thatcher years.
Although he attended Goldsmiths, the college that under the tutelage of Michael Craig Martin produced most of the YBAs, Wallinger’s work sits outside the ironic posturing of much of that group. Older by a number of years, his attitudes were minted in the hardcore political years of the 1970s. At college he came across a number of books that would be seminal to his intellectual and artistic development: Joyce’s Ulysses, on which he wrote his thesis, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class(1963) and John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (1980). Always interested in issues of social injustice, he didn’t, he says, get along well with authority. Does he, I ask, see himself as an issue-based artist who reaches for metaphors rather than playing with ironic conceits? For me art has to have a certain ambiguity that keeps it alive. One of the reasons I stopped painting was because I was using painting rather than making paintings. As a painter there was no place to go. It’s easy to get trapped by your own facilities and the weight of art history. History has got painting by the throat. The work was becoming too arch. I wanted to make work about being in the real world. There’s something a bit antediluvian about spending one’s time stretching canvases and squeezing paint. I like art that’s democratic, that suggests you, too, can do this.”
Myth and religion seem to have an important role in his work, I suggest. Well,” he says, I had the idea for Ecce Homo whilst on the phone. It was almost instant. It was, after all, the millennium and no one was mentioning Christ, which seemed a bit odd. I wanted to know how much residual connection there still was in this country with the Christian tradition. I liked the idea of the vulnerability of the piece standing alone on its plinth in Trafalgar Square, a place that has seen many political protests.”
I wondered if age and success have changed the way he makes art. You build up a body of work by following your nose and gravitate towards certain themes and intellectual ideas and just hope that you’re not getting worse!” he answers. I’m in the business of asking questions. I am not interested in being didactic. I don’t bring a signature style to what I make. As to success, well, I spent two years working on Metamorphosis and was paid £5,000. So it’s not riches.”
So what is important to him? That a work has impact, beauty, poetry, truth.” That sounds a bit like an old-fashioned romantic, I suggest. He laughs. But I also have to enjoy the function and rigor of the piece.” Having abandoned painting he has made an incredibly varied array of work, but what underpins it all is a questioning humanity. In 2008 he created Folk Stones” for the Folkestone Triennial on the East Kent coast. Set in concrete were 19,240 numbered stones on the town’s clifftop overlooking the English Channel. It was from here that millions of soldiers left for a certain death on the battlefields of France during the First World War. Each numbered stone corresponds with a soldier who died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. It is a powerful, moving monument, but one that does not aggrandize.
While being fully aware of the relationship between signifier and the signified it ultimately puts human compassion center stage. Here, then, is a rare artist who is unafraid of the big questions, who relishes ambiguity and whose work is open to multiple readings. In 2008 he was commissioned to place a Y-shaped painted steel sculpture resembling a tree in the idyllic Bat Willow Meadow of Magdalen College, Oxford. This poignant piece could stand as a logo for much of Wallinger’s work in that it encourages the viewer to ask the question, Why?” and then listen for the varying answers that bounce back.
In this issue of Artillery we’re featuring three stories on film. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t planned that way, but things just fell into place. Oddly enough, the three filmmakers represent a microcosm of hierarchical filmmaking. From acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick to indie filmmaker riding the crest, Mike Ott, with Larry Clark in the middle, a rebel artist finally getting his due with Best Film at the Rome Film Festival.