Artillery Magazine

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Gallery Girls

IF ANY OUTLIER SLEEPER CELLS OF AL QAEDA need further evidential motivation to make another terrorist strike against the decadent West, they need look no further than Bravo’s new so-called reality series Gallery Girls. In a desperate ploy to further capitalize on the machinations of the New York art world—as they did with their earlier Work of Art—Bravo and LA-based production company Magical Elves have unleashed an inexcusable mutant offspring. Appealing to their proven demographic of gay men and the mentally disabled, these television crap peddlers have cooked up a series wherein a coven of privileged, loosely connected millennial shrews suffer the First World humiliations of working extended, unpaid internships at gallery front desks, assisting personal art advisors and making a go at running their own boutique-galleries.

The nascent gallerists consist of anxious, entrepreneurial brunette Claudia, who worries that the $15K loan from her family will never be repaid because she charges too much for art that nobody wants, and her partner Chantal, who exhibits the worst traits of her narcissistic generation. With a voice like the scraping of a soggy balloon and an affectation to match, Chantal lowers clueless selfishness to a new, grotesque nadir. She’s the type who shows up to work late and leaves early and can’t figure out why everyone has a problem with it. Like, whatever.

Young punching bag Maggie can’t escape her endless codependent internship for misogynist Asian-art dealer Eli Klein, the sort of Jewish caricature that only a Nazi propagandist could fabricate. He repeatedly, callously insists that Maggie perform demeaning tasks like counting the hundreds of pebbles in a plant-based sculpture or scrubbing floors while he grinningly sucks up to wealthy prospective buyers.

Fag hag, part-time model and party photographer Angela brings some sass and sarcasm to the mix but is also annoyingly self-absorbed, and is more concerned with creating hype around her “fine art” than actually making it anything other than sophomoric and mediocre. On her prowl for a heterosexual male partner she is frustrated about the shrinking stock of available men and claims that anyway she can’t date a man who doesn’t have an iPhone and a Gmail account.

The most interesting thing about Liz is her schlubby, estranged father who also happens to be a well-known collector. She is well set up in an expensively decorated apartment pursuing a degree at SVA, where she complains about the preponderance of Asian students. An ex-junkie with a wounded heart and some serious daddy issues, she has a certain realness to her despite having grown up about as destitute as Mitt Romney.

Amy is the brazen, know-it-all heifer who sucks as much alcohol as she does air and turns into a raging hot mess when she hits the bottle, which is often enough that everyone complains about it. The best contribution she could make to society would be getting fatally run over by a truck, thus reducing the burden on the health-care system and being a job creator in the mortuary industry.

The least offensive character is Kerri, who actually works a real, paid day job as a personal concierge (yes, that’s a real, paid job) while interning for art advisor Sharon Hurowitz. She manages to embody the myth of the Long Island girl from the blue-collar background trying to improve her station in life in the big city. She is sincere and straightforward and does not reek of the oppressive entitlement of her cohorts, which may eventually lead to her undoing.

In a flailing, transparent attempt at street cred, the producers have “cleverly” named each episode after a Velvet Underground tune, perhaps to pave the way for a new VU line of perfume or handbags marketed at young women whose only form of expression is shopping.

In addition, they try to drum up a kind of rivalry between the uptown bottle blonds with their meathead banker boyfriends and the “funky” Brooklynites with their metrosexual mates who are all skinny jeans and nerd glasses. It is refreshing to know that the diverse population of New York City can’t be so easily reduced to embarrassing stereotypes.

There is some twisted guilty pleasure to be had in watching overeducated women cat scratch at each other and humiliate themselves as they chase after some unspecified “dream,” but mostly it is a shame-filled experience that leaves the viewer with a fecal taste in the mouth and a deep resentment for having carved even one second of precious time from this short life to squander on such a vile and pointless fiasco.

Gallery Girls, Bravo, Mondays, 10/9c

December 31, 2012
CINDY SHERMAN AND LEE MILLER

NARCISSISM MAY BE AT THE CORE OF SOME ARTISTIC PRACTICE, but rarely is it flaunted so grandly as in the work of Cindy Sherman. She has denied that her photographs are self-portraiture, but despite her assumption of various guises—sometimes so laden with prosthetics and wigs and costumes that she is unrecognizable—we know it is Cindy Sherman underneath because that is her modus operandi. And we know that because she is one of the most renowned and most influential of contemporary artists today.

A major retrospective of Sherman has been long due, and MoMA New York launched “Cindy Sherman” earlier this year. When the show opened this summer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (ending October 8), so did another show featuring a woman photographer on the other side of town, the Legion of Honor’s “Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism” (ending October 14). This set me to thinking about these two women, born a couple generations apart, and how differently the course of their careers ran, partly due to temperament and partly due to the times.

Lee Miller was born over a century ago, in 1907, and had an extraordinary life in the arts in New York and Paris. She hobnobbed with the Surrealists, was photographed and was a photographer forVogue and other top publications, then she gave up photography in 1953. Cindy Sherman was born a year after that, in 1954, a baby boomer fortunate enough to discover her métier early, while still a student at Buffalo State College. She came of age as conceptual art and photography were both becoming part of the art scene, and her genius was to blend them with identity politics.

As a student Sherman had begun using herself as subject and object of her photography. In those pre-digital days, she even hand-cut multiples of herself and pasted them together, like a time-lapse sequence or a chorus line. The short film she made combining such figures and stop-motion, Doll Clothes (1975), is a highlight of the show. She was already exploring the nature of identity, specifically the female identity, and the pernicious influence of cultural norms and the media. From the beginning she worked solo—doing the hair and makeup, assembling the costume, arranging the set and the lighting, and shooting the picture.

I do love the “Untitled Film Stills” series (1977—80), which features Sherman dressed up in the style of starlets from films of the 1950s and 1960s, a series which was smart and innovative for the way it both highlighted and questioned how women had been depicted in cinema. The full set of 70 is shown here. My favorite is her “centerfolds” series (1981)—large color photographs in which she set herself up as subject of a men’s magazine spread. By now she had mastered commercial lighting techniques, so the photographs look beautiful and lush, and there’s an intensity about her acting for the camera. In a rare 1985 interview with Bomb magazine, she said, “When I became involved with close-ups I needed more information in the expression. I couldn’t depend on background or atmosphere. I wanted the story to come from the face.” These women are lying on the floor, a crumpled bed or a sofa, and they look anxious, pensive, in a daze. They all seem to be asking one question: “What will become of me?” It’s hard not to see some self-identification in these portraits—after all, Sherman is playing women her own age—and that makes these photographs some of the richest in her oeuvre.

More recent series have pulled further and further away from self—such as the history portraits (1989—90) where she emulates figures and poses from Old Master paintings, “clowns” (2003&mdash04) in which she is dressed like circus clowns, and society portraits (2008) showing Palm Beach—type dowagers with heavy makeup and bad wigs.

Lee Miller is not as well-known as Sherman but has had a revival in the last decade or so. She is often known for the famous men she had liaisons with, including Man Ray and Picasso, and the Legion of Honor show is posited as being about Man Ray and Lee Miller, their relationship and their influence on each other. After a modeling career in New York—yes, she was blonde and gorgeous—Miller became interested in photography. In 1929, she went to Paris, located Man Ray and announced that she was going to study with him. They lived together from 1929 to 1932, evolving from teacher/student to lovers. The show includes their early experiments with solarization, which they discovered together, according to a 1975 interview with Miller.

“For Miller, the camera and the photograph as objects cut two ways,” Linda Hartigan writes in the show’s catalog. “They were the vehicles for objectifying her, initially by her father the amateur photographer and then by photographers from the worlds of fashion, journalism and art.” At the beginning, Miller, like centuries of women before her, surrendered to that kind of attention, attention lavished on their physical beauty, their appearance. They surrendered to the male gaze. Two photographs in the exhibition show us the difference between the male gaze and female self-regard. One is Man Ray’s soft-focus Lee Miller Nude with Sunray Lamp(1929), in which she sits on a blanket, her head bent down, her legs demurely crossed. Nearby is Miller’s Self Portrait (1930), where she’s sitting upright, both arms raised to show her musculature, and her face turned boldly into the light source. It’s a powerful, assertive pose.

Miller understood the objectifying, and in the early ’30s said, “I would rather take a picture than be one.” She had already set up her own studio in 1930, and at the end of 1932 she left Paris and Man Ray and went to New York. She found portraiture and commercial work. Eventually, the two became friends and saw each other on occasion in Europe and in the United States.

Man Ray went on to make assemblage, paintings and conceptual work. Apparently he kept a torch burning for her, despite other women he would have in his life. There’s something rather creepy about the fact that he so objectified Miller that she became, in his work, a detached physical detail such as an eye or a pair of lips. The eye he set on his famous metronome is said to be her eye (called Indestructible Object, it was meant to be smashed with a hammer), and the giant pair of lips floating in the sky in his 1935-38 painting, A l’Heure de l’Observatoire—Les Amoureux, are said to be her lips.

Miller had a restless spirit. When World War II came, she become a photojournalist and went to Europe for Vogue. (Man Ray, however, escaped the war by relocating to LA&mdahshhe was, after all, an American.) She covered the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and was one of the first Allied photographers to enter the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau after the defeat of Nazi Germany. In Leipzig she photographed the corpses of the mayor and his wife and daughter, who committed suicide in his office. The exhibition includes Miller’s contact sheet, and the shot I find especially haunting is the one in which Miller framed the daughter on one chair, the mother on another nearby, their slumped bodies echoing each other. Another shot is of two shaven-headed French women, out in the street and harassed for being collaborators with the enemy. These photographs are a terrible testament to war and its effects on women, something Miller seemed especially sensitive to.

Indeed, so sensitive it eventually sent her into a depression. Although she continued to work forVogue after the war, she was haunted by the limp and mangled bodies she had seen in Europe. She began to drink heavily and, as her son says, went on a “downward spiral.” Miller pretty much gave up photography in 1953, and died in 1977. It’s a tragic story, but a real one. The Ray/Miller exhibition tells us something about Miller’s character, both her strength and her vulnerability, and her connection to the world around her. Miller’s journey with photography ultimately provided a deeper look into the human condition.

The same cannot be said for Cindy Sherman, whose exploration of surface has become, well, even more superficial. The people she portrays/photographs in her society portraits are shells of people, with their tight smiles and overdone coiffure. In some ways, her clown series hits the target, as clowns are overdressed and over-the-top by definition, and their painted faces always mask true identity. However, I feel more distanced from Sherman’s newer images, and in the case of society portraits, I wonder if the straight-on photographs of Yvonne Venegas or Lauren Greenfield don’t tell us more about the women of the moneyed class.

Perhaps Sherman’s shifting disguise is losing its impact, and women photographers using a documentary approach, as Miller did, and as Venegas, Greenfield and even Catherine Opie do, are more effective, at least for me. Sherman is trying to update by going digital as in the mural at the SFMOMA exhibition, now with digitally morphed faces and dressed up as eccentrics. I’m not sure what’s new or revelatory here, but that’s still Cindy beneath her camouflage.

December 31, 2012
LAURA LONDON

Laura London often channels celebrities through her photography, but not necessarily in ways that you’d expect. She doesn’t document musicians, models or actors onstage or off, or portray them in surreal situations like say, Annie Liebovitz does. Instead, she asks teens and young adults she knows to perform for the camera. By photographing them preening and vamping as an exploration of idealized identity, London’s images become about the nature of culturally indoctrinated emulation.

Laura London, Rock Star Moment 2, 2000, Courtesy Laura London

In one of her images from “Rock Star Moment,” a series from 2000, a teen faces the camera with attitude, a guitar hung at her waist. Decked out in baby-doll dress and platinum wig, with black nail polish and smeary lipstick, the girl passes as a juvenile version of Courtney Love. In another picture the girl is dressed in black, leaning over a bathroom sink. Her mirrored reflection reveals a face masked with dark eyeliner and blood-red lipstick, her expression feigning Trent Reznor’s creepy living-dead look. Those two photographs suggest how London approaches her young subjects; that collaboration is a necessary component, even if it is left ambiguous as to whose imagination (the photographer’s or the model’s) is really being tapped.

“Once Upon a Time… ” is London’s most recent and ambitious series, begun in 2007 and periodically updated. Like her earlier work, it involves collaboration with young actors and a reliance on imagination. But the concept for the series was sparked by memories from a real situation. Rose, the charismatic singer of Guns N’ Roses, was a neighbor of London’s in 1990. One only had to stand in line at the supermarket to know about his on-and-off relationship with his then-wife, Erin Everly. Rose was often in the news for volatile behavior, and word in the neighborhood was that he argued with his wife and painted graffiti on their garage door. London took a photo of the garage door and Garage Text, 2010, is the result. (The spray-paint scrawl even referenced “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” a famous GNR song he wrote, inspired by Everly.)

London never intended to publish anything from the roll of film she shot that day, and put it away. About two decades later, it became the catalyst for this new body of work. Most pictures from the series are invented scenes, for which she hired a crew to help: actors, a makeup artist, and an artist to paint the many fake tattoos. Whether a male or female model stands in as “Axl,” he/she becomes the androgynous sex symbol Rose was in his youth: slim and muscular, with long blond hair, pale skin, pouty lips and mournful eyes. Often, the actor is dressed in a sleeveless white T-shirt to show off tattooed arms, and of course the trademark red bandanna across the forehead.

Laura London, Once Upon A Time 6, 2010, Courtesy Laura London

In Once Upon A Time 6 (2010) London’s model actually posed across the street from Everly’s house, in front of the bushes where rumor held that Rose had thrown his wife’s wedding ring. Neighbors told London they saw him later in the same spot with a metal detector. In the photograph, the actor is wearing a long black coat embellished with colorful embroidery, heavy boots, a black hat, and long blond wig, his face obscured from view. The image resembles a fashion shot, but is infused with reference to an anecdotal occurrence. It is neither pure fact nor exclusively fiction.

In Once Upon A Time 1 (2009) London’s nephew projects a calm and in-control performer, charismatic and sexy. He’s a pretty boy with a bad-boy aura, his arms covered in tattoos of girls and crosses, dressed in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and bandanna as head-scarf. The nephew has the young Axl’s delicate complexion, but not the buff physique, which adds a level of humor. So do the painted-on eyebrows and tattoos and the actor’s melodramatic expression. In other photographs, “Axl” poses with “Erin.” In True Love Tattoo (2010) “Erin” stands alone with her bare back to the viewer. Her long, wavy, honey-brown hair is seductively wrapped around her neck to reveal a tattoo with roses, birds, hearts and the message “true love.” (Rose’s real-life relationships were tumultuous, with legal accusations of assault and battery from not just Everly, but Rose’s subsequent main squeeze, supermodel Stephanie Seymour.)

Once Upon A Time 5, 2009, Courtesy Laura London

“Axl” comes with an entourage of not just ex-girlfriends but ex-bandmates. Another of London’s nephews poses as guitarist Slash, in a wig of long black curly hair and a Jack Daniels Whiskey T-shirt. He looks fey, with makeup and jewelry, in spite of the signature top hat, sunglasses, tattoos and heavy boots. In still more pictures, some black and white rather than color, “Axl” and “Slash” are joined by other members of GNR’s original lineup, circa the celebrated 1987 album Appetite for Destruction. The models’ performed demeanors add an air of all-out ridiculousness in the vein of This is Spinal Tap.

Laura London, Once Upon A Time 9, 2009, Courtesy Laura London

In Once Upon A Time 9 (2010) a bare-chested and jean-clad “Axl” looks like a drag queen in a disheveled wig, with heavy painted eyebrows and pink lips. He hugs himself and feigns angst. Another example of gender-bending as a comedic play on androgyny is London’s inspiration to have a female model pose as the protagonist. London’s young intern becomes “Portrait 1” and two images—one of her in cowboy boots on a carpet and the other looking like the real-life young woman she is, seated on a stool—seem a perfect pair to convey the contrast between reality and acting and play it for humor.

The melodrama that London’s models project as deadpan and earnest brings to mind reality TV. Think of The Osbournes. And if you consider that the deliberate blurring of fact and fiction may be our updated version of the long tradition of documentary photography, reality TV is a good parallel. London’s photographs are about the nature of “seeing” in our now over-exposed society. With a 24/7 media environment dominating real life, truth and fiction become fused—an ironic condition for a medium that traditionally kept those realms separate.

Laura London, Salon Style Wall 2, Group Portrait 2, 2000, Courtesy Laura London.

November 2, 2012
Editor’s Letter

Dear Readers,

I’m sitting in a media booth at an art fair on a sweltering late August afternoon writing this editor’s letter. It’s not working because I keep getting interrupted, but there’s air conditioning, so I’m not complaining.

Even though fair-goers tend to have a glazed look on their face by the time they wander into the magazine section of an art fair, they somehow come to life when they get to Artillery, tethering me to the booth with their many questions. I did manage to get away toward the end of the day however, and go see some art. Since so little time was left, I made sure to visit Co/Lab this time, a section that mainly features nonprofit and artist-run spaces. I knew this was where I would most likely see fresh work as opposed to the obviously market-driven art so often exhibited at fairs.

Now that the fair is over (and on to the next!), most of the art I saw is just a blur. But there was this one piece, a plastic fork—apparently used—hanging on the gallery wall just like another piece of art, even though it was clearly just an ordinary plastic fork, perhaps at one time accompanied by some take-out food. The flimsy cheap white tongs were even stained an orange-brown, seemingly glistening from a recent meal.

I didn’t pay much attention to the fork the first time I saw it. I progressed swiftly to the next piece, which I found to be much more interesting (even though I can hardly recall it now). I was ready to move on when the artist stopped me and wanted to know what I thought of his fork piece.

I told him that I had in fact seen it, but it hadn’t interested me enough to ponder its significance. The artist promptly launched into a spiel about the symbolism of the used plastic fork, how it represented artists and poverty and how Top Ramen noodles were the only meal starving artists could afford during their student days. I listened to him for a while then asked, “How much?” He told me $1,000. I flinched at first, but then decided that that was probably a good price. (Why not ask $1,000?) But mainly—the artist made sure I knew—the fork was in honor of a now successful friend who still eats Top Ramen to this day, even though he could easily afford a daily diet of Lobster Bisque.

It wasn’t until after the fair, however, that the plastic fork really began to resonate for me. It wasn’t because it was a sublime piece of art, (okay, it’s a little silly to suggest that it’s sublime); rather, it was the artist, that continued to fascinate me. Whether he had just finished a bowl of Top Ramen and decided at the last minute to put the fork on the wall and call it art really doesn’t matter. What matters is how much he wanted to tell me, his audience, why it was important to him.

Or was he just playing with my mind? Whatever the case may be, I felt like he was making art, right in front of me, and that that’s what creating is all about. And that’s what this issue is all about. The artists. No fairs, no biennials, no auctions. Just the artists, the ones who really make this big, expansive art world go ’round, and are probably eating Top Ramen noodles right now.

November 2, 2012
THE POETS HOUSE

A quivering grid of afternoon sunlight shifts across the polished hardwood floor of a long narrow room. But for the drowsy hum of the air conditioner, all is silence and stillness, an ambience ideally conducive to the reception and refinement of clear thought. Immersed in scholarly retreat, an owlish old man with a malodorous rucksack occupies an armchair. Students stretch out on sofas; others sit at desks that border the room, pecking at laptops or scribbling in notebooks. A display of books by the greats—Milton, Herbert, Dickinson, Eliot—line the window ledges like poetic ramparts against the world outside, where crowds flock Battery Park and ferries traverse the glittering Hudson toward the skyline of Jersey City beyond.

It is unusual to find this many people (today, at least 10) gathered in silent contemplation of the written word. The Poets House is not a library—books can only be perused on-site —but it is laid out like one, and unlike most libraries nowadays, which often seem more like video arcades or children’s playgrounds, this one has only one public computer on the premises, for accessing the data base—strictly no Internet use, as I found out when rebuked by an intern for browsing a horse-racing site. The Poets House, naturally, houses only poetry, that most ignored and impractical of the arts: more than 50,000 volumes of it, and growing.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
—William Carlos Williams

With weighty biographies and critical studies thrown in, Blake, Whitman, Stevens and other prolific heavy-hitters take up one or two shelves on their own. Less predictably—with Kleist above and Koch below—the works of Bill Knott occupy almost an entire row, the black lettering on many of the thick white spines shamelessly flaunting the Lulu imprint. The open-door policy results in a preponderance of self-published books. Aisles of obscurity, shelves of neglect, florilegiums of futility, all meticulously alphabetized: a repository of poets who thought their thoughts worth recording, their words worth sharing.

“So many had sacrificed themselves for art without even their names surviving. On the other hand, what mattered most was that all who had given themselves to their work had their real reward in having actualized themselves.” Easy enough for John Berryman to say, considering his place in the pantheon, but perhaps not particularly comforting to poets whose efforts at self-actualization have never advanced beyond open mic nights in empty coffee houses and years on end of polite rejection from little magazines that almost nobody reads.

I open the Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos at a random page: “Attacked by people I admire/as a poseur, or knave, or liar/perceived as dry, or shrill, or bored/or (worst of all) roundly ignored.” Which seems to sum up the poet’s lot. Resentment or indifference are the usual reward for crafting felicitous lines, and—it goes without saying—a complete lack of remuneration that is accepted as an essential and unavoidable element of the poetic occupation.

As any unknown poet will tell you, modern poetry is a nepotistic arena in which success is entirely dependent upon who you know. There is no “supply meets demand” dynamic such as exists with music and art, where middlemen are perpetually scurrying around in order to satisfy the appetites of an ever-increasing audience hungry for whatever’s thrown at them. Because there isn’t much of an audience, it follows that there is no universally recognized criterion of quality, so it’s easy to perpetuate a closed-world incestuousness determined by critical and academic preciosity. Modern poetry, like modern art, is often prized according to its obscurity (to produce work that is direct and accessible is to render it inaccessible to critics: it leaves them with nothing to do and could put them out of business if allowed to flourish), and innocent readers sometimes wonder why it needs to be interpreted rather than experienced.

I, too, dislike it: Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
—Marianne Moore

The musing silence is occasionally broken by a book cart wheeling along the floor or the tapping of footsteps as a librarian walks by, smiling graciously at the visitors. On a neighboring sofa, a woman with dark, soulful eyes smiles mysteriously to herself. I try to read the title of the book that has provoked such a seductive reaction but it’s concealed by the back of her luminously-veined hand.

The spines of many of these volumes bespeak sad lives dedicated to a difficult and often masochistic pursuit. An original volume of Frank Stanford’s Crib Death published by Lost Roads and signed by C.D. Wright—with whom Stanford had an affair that precipitated his suicide—has a sacred, haunting quality. As does much of his work: the title of one poem, “Death on a Cool Evening,” is richly resonant in light of his chosen end.

Further along, the fecundity of the Ts is noticeable—more tragic poets—in particular, the Thomases: Dylan, Edward and R.S. Then there’s Francis Thompson, author of “The Hound of Heaven,” while strangely conspicuous by its absence is James Thomson’s “City of Dreadful Night.” Presumably it hasn’t been donated yet.

Poetry is language. And nowadays language isn’t greatly valued as a form of communication. In which respect the Poets House is a last redoubt, closed off from the city’s tumult: a place where the old verities are upheld, where poetry feels important and words can breathe.

Language is free. Take generously.

Poets House, 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282, 212.431.7920, ext. 2818, www.poetshouse.org

Perusing the library, Photo Courtesy of Mark Woods.

November 1, 2012
Prizes and Politics

Nights CAN BE long in Moscow. But come spring, as the light fades ever more slowly, the evenings get off to a late start. Which may be why I inadvertently kept a driver waiting on the evening of April 3rd to ferry me and another journalist to the sprawling Artplay Design Center in the Kurskaya district of Moscow for the Seventh Annual Innovation Prize award ceremonies. In lieu of the press preview of Prize nominees which had begun while I was still en route, the two of us had taken a leisurely stroll around the Arbat neighborhood, where we were staying, and visited the from-the-ground-up replica Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer—as much a symbol of Russian redemption from Stalinism as religious resurgence.

Artplay, one of several industrial facilities in Moscow to be reconfigured into an “art cluster,” is an exhibition facility fit for a megalopolis. On a multiple–football field–length expanse of its mezzanine level is what seems like half the Moscow art world, along with a phalanx of media from Russian outlets to Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

One of the first people I’m introduced to is a gaunt, cerebral-looking gentleman, who turns out to be Alexander Brodsky. His “Cisterna” has been nominated for (and ends up winning) the Innovation Prize for Best Work of Visual Art. But the moment is almost completely lost on me, his identity blurred in the cacophony of the moment, as I try to distinguish him from the Alexander Borovsky (of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg), who’s one of the jurors, and Alexander Gronsky, a photographer who’s been nominated for the Innovation “New Generation” Prize. It’s not for two or three days, not long after I’ve seen the documentation for the dramatic “Cisterna” installation, that I finally realize Brodsky may be one of the few contemporary Russian artists I’ve encountered off Russian soil. His work has not only been exhibited in New York (and elsewhere) since the 1990s; he actually lived in New York between 1996 and 1999 and was included in the Guggenheim’s huge “Russia!” survey of 2005.

For the moment, though, there are curators, collectors, museum officials, gallery directors, other media folks and a smattering of the award nominees who I’m trying (in vain) to correlate to the categories they’re nominated in. Standing like a beacon in this scrum is the Innovation Prize director, Christina Steinbrecher, resplendent in a long acid-chartreuse dress, whose success as the director of Moscow’s Central House of Artists and art director of the ArtMoscow fair, and more specifically, in negotiating the divergent political currents in the Russian art world generally, doubtless played into her appointment to the position. Politics have played no small role in both major Russian art prizes—the Kandinsky, sponsored by the ArtChronika Cultural Foundation, the philanthropic arm of ArtChronika, Russia’s dominant art publication; and the Innovation Prizes, sponsored by the National Center for Contemporary Art, which maintains branches in St. Petersburg and the Urals as well as Moscow.

If there was any thought that the state-supported NCCA might be reticent to unleash the politically unorthodox, the 2005 debut of the Innovation Prizes put that fear to rest. Both the Kandinsky and Innovation Prizes have gone to politically controversial nominees. The 2008 Kandinsky Prize winner, Aleksey Belyaev-Gintovt, was critically assailed for the neo-Stalinist aesthetic of his plainly nationalistic “Daughter Russia.” Last year’s Innovation Prize for the Best Work of Visual Art went to the firebrand art collective Voina (War) for one of its most spectacular protest gestures—a 65-meter length graffiti phallus painted on the underside of a drawbridge that crossed directly to the St. Petersburg headquarters of the FSB (formerly, KGB). One of the collective members, Alexei Plutser-Sarno publicly scorned the nomination as a co-optation—all of a piece with the controversy that swirls around these contests. A cursory scan of response by nominees and winners of these prizes makes it clear that biting the hands that feed us is the default posture for the artist who suffers to be recognized.

Alexander Brodsky’s “Cisterna,” 2011, which won the Innovation Prize for Best Work of Visual Art.

Still, it was hard to escape the sense that Innovation’s nominating committee had taken a step back from political outrage. In a conversation not long before the jury convened to decide upon the final awards, Steinbrecher herself took note of the public ambivalence and conflicting attitudes that colored the political backdrop.

In the meantime, another art (or, as self-described, “feminist punk/rock”) street performance collective, Pussy Riot, was responding to this ambivalence in its chosen fashion—with a guerilla performance staged in that aforementioned symbol of resurgent and conflicting Russian aspirations, the Church of Christ the Redeemer, provoking the two-fold wrath of Moscow’s law enforcement and the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow. Three members of the band were detained and still jailed on the evening of the Innovation awards. (They remain in jail—an international cause célèbre.)

The elaborately staged Innovation Awards were televised with the Aidan Gallery’s own Aidan Salakhova and Moscow publisher Philipp Dzaydko hosting the telecast. Only days later I learned that Salakhova would be closing her gallery in the Winzavod gallery complex to focus on her own studio practice, which seemed to fit a certain economic/behavioral pattern in the evolving Moscow art world. Open big (preferably in a landmark industrial space), close quietly/suddenly, and reappear as something else, maybe even somewhere else.

Winzavod is not very far from Artplay, but seems worlds apart from its retro-futurist aspect. Winzavod is a vast 19th-century winery transformed into a complex of gallery/exhibition, performance and studio spaces, architectural and design offices, including an attractive café and retail space. But the approach from the Kursky train station retains a certain grittiness—traversing a motley assemblage of fast food joints and novelty hawkers, and finally an underpass that features amazing graffiti. Depending upon what’s being exhibited at the galleries, the street art, some of it in all probability by Moscow’s most famous street artist, Misha Most, may be the highlight of the excursion. Although Elena Panteleeva, Winzavod’s director, wasn’t specific about gallery comings and goings, it was clear by the time I left Moscow that the commercial gallery rentals at Winzavod were just half of what they had been only two years earlier.

Winzavod’s nominee for Innovation’s hotly contested “New Generation” award (co-sponsored by the Stella Art Foundation) had been Valery Chtak, an artist represented by the complex’s Paperworks Gallery.
But when the smoke cleared we learned that the award would go to Louise Brooks–bobbed Taus Makhacheva, for her video installation, “The Fast and the Furious.” (Alexander Gronsky took home a special British Council award for his photographic series, “Pastoral.”)

Makhacheva’s work might be called conceptual—but “The Fast and the Furious” is also very personal. It took Makhacheva back to her family’s ancestral roots in Dagestan, a semi-autonomous region of the Caucasus with a distinctly macho (and car) culture, and involved a bit of performance on the artist’s part. A week later, Makhacheva opened another, even more controversial, multi-channel video installation drawing on the aggressive alpha-male culture of Dagestan—this one documenting dog fights and their participants in tandem with documentary footage of a freestyle wrestling champion—at the Paperworks Gallery.

Upon entering the discreet quarters of the Stella Art Foundation one could be forgiven for hearing echoes of that open-close rhythm of Moscow’s commercial art world. Its gallery was featuring an exhibition of painted fans by Andrei Fillipov, that opened and closed explosively as painted light fixtures went on and off directly behind them. Unlike many “oligarchettes” who have pursued their art collecting ambitions abroad—among the blue-chip international brands at auctions in London and New York—Stella Kesaeva has kept her focus on Russia.

Which is not to say that Kesaeva has entirely ignored the international art world. When I sit down to chat with Nikolai Molok, the Stella Foundation’s development director, I do so in full view of a large portrait of Kesaeva by Alex Katz, with a Damien Hirst dot painting on the opposite wall and a Koons balloon dog off to one side. Molok emphasized that the core mission of the Stella Foundation was to support the Moscow Conceptualists. Beyond that, the foundation sought out artists from every region, including the former Soviet republics, to showcase on and off the foundation premises.

Anatoly Osmolovsky’s “Bread” series, 2012

The ever-expanding scope of the Stella Foundation’s activities would lead one to believe that it would soon outgrow its quiet location; and indeed Kesaeva and her foundation have ambitions for a full-blown contemporary art museum—a joint public-private venture to be housed in a former bus garage designed by Konstantin Melnikov—not to be confused with the Garage complex (designed by the same architect) Moscow-London-LA art-fashion oligarchette Dasha Zhukova recently closed, and reportedly intends to reopen.

If it seemed to some that the Innovation ceremony wrapped anticlimactically, it probably had less to do with the nominees’ distance from political gesture or controversy than a sense that a good deal of the recognition memorialized by the awards—especially Brodsky’s— was overdue. A special award was given to Zurab Tsereteli, a sculptor and philanthropist, “for the support of Russian contemporary art.” Not until later that week would I learn what an understatement that was.

I did not see Brodsky or Tsereteli at the sumptuous after-party, but it seemed as if every other important Moscow museum or cultural commissar was there, from the NCCA’s Mikhail Mindlin, who had appointed Steinbrecher to oversee the Innovation awards, to Olga Sviblova, the prodigiously energetic founding director of Moscow’s Multimedia Art Museum.

“It’s said that she never sleeps,” painter, curator, writer and critic Maria Naimushina, says to me the following week, in husband Oleg Tyrkin’s studio, not far from the Petrovka branch of the Museum of Modern Art. Judging from the extent of her museum activities—with the Moscow Photography Biennale in full swing, MMAM shows filled both its Arbat flagship and the Central Exhibition Hall Manege near the Kremlin—it seemed entirely conceivable. At the Central Exhibition Hall, I encountered another expert—Matthew Stephenson, then director of Christie’s Russia. Although Stephenson’s role frequently involved connecting Moscow’s collectors with the international “brand” names that dominate the auction markets in London and New York, not unlike Kesaeva’s advisors, he is broadly informed on virtually the entire scope of collecting activities in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, including Russian artists of almost every practice and degree of prominence—and many of the anonymous “Nonconformists” who preceded them.

It came as no surprise to later discover that Stephenson had a small but choice collection of Russian artists. Unlike Brodsky, Komar, Kabakov, et al., their names were unfamiliar to me. But their significance, even brilliance, was immediately manifest. It would be hard not to be struck by, for example, one of Vitaly Pushnitsky’s lightboxes of the early 2000s. They have a Cornell quality about them crossed with something equal parts Starn Twins and Jack Goldstein. Or Olga Chernysheva’s “On Duty” series of 2007. Is it remotely possible to regard anyone as “faceless” after looking at these photographs? Issues of materiality and fungibility are interwoven with the spiritual and sacral in Kandinsky Prize–winner Anatoly Osmolovsky’s “Bread” series.

Although Osmolovsky and a number of his peers have achieved some degree of local, national and even international recognition, there are scores who remain unknown. Hence the top-down push by the commissars of the public and private spheres to find, encourage, reward and sustain the best, most innovative talent. Yet connecting the talent, innovation and ideas with an audience of informed enthusiasts, collectors, and the culture at large remains challenging, particularly in economically challenged conditions.

Spotting Zurab Tsereteli’s son, Wassily, in a restaurant at the Petrovka branch of Museum of Modern Art—the museum his father founded and funded—Naimushina seemed to imply that Tsereteli’s ever expansive and relentless social networking might be usefully applied to a communications and distribution system that frequently ignores the middle- class “aspirational” collector that needs to be drawn into Russia’s evolving art market. Connecting a distracted and disconnected public with an avant-garde associated with places like Winzavod might be difficult when “99% come from yards like that.”

“How do you identify who the innovators are, who is truly innovative, among a small circle of emerging artists,” Stephenson asked rhetorically. “But there were a lot of young, up-and-coming artists there [at the Innovation awards ceremony]. It gives them something to aim for. Everyone connected with the art world was there: the NCCA, the stakeholders, media artists, aspirational collectors, people in business. The owners of these new businesses want to be seen. It’s a new element in society.”

This was something you could see people coming to grips with in Moscow—both in the art and on the street: the redefinition of a society and its aspirations. Scarred by war and starved for three generations, Russian artists who could once scarcely breathe their aspirations for fear of censure seem to want to inhale the sky. Yet juxtaposed with the immensity of this ambition is the Moscow still reclaiming, rehabilitating and renovating its past. It has taken a generation to move past a degree of cynicism and mistrust that would have once constrained (if not crushed) such scope and ambition. While distanced from current political controversy, Brodsky’s award for “Cisterna” seemed an appropriate summation, invoking the “invisible cities” contained within the “Big City”—the imaginary, aspirational city that precedes and succeeds the built city absorbing it all; and portending a new “Silver Age” the aspirational Moscow may yet seize beyond its long nights.

September 9, 2012
Daniel Martinez

TRANSFORMATION CAN BE PERILOUS TERRITORY FOR AN ARTIST TO navigate, and to be authentic necessarily involves pain, either psychic or physical. Daniel Joseph Martinez’ newest exhibition, the first in Los Angeles in five years, displays a fiercely compelling and forceful visual lexicon drawn from the artist’s personal associations with body dysmorphia, and which combines images of the physical body with overtly politically-charged iconography including the Statue of Liberty and various religious artifacts.

Working with large-scale photographic images, sculptural works, and found objects including a police riot shield, neon signage and a bullhorn used largely by street preachers, Martinez communicates a rapidly unraveling human dystopia as everywhere people struggle to express their own identities despite the fact that space is getting tighter and money more scarce.

In the photographs, the artist transgresses against his own body, sporting a grotesque hunchback and positioning himself at various turns on a prayer rug, or wearing a papal tiara and a mask that has a vague and unsettling resemblance to Richard Nixon. In several images his tattooed arms display the holiest Hebrew prayer: “Hear Israel, God is one,” written in Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, further exemplifying the body as a politicized public space where pain is often invisible. But pain is a universal human experience around which entire civilizations have rallied and here Martinez implicates the entire living world. Each photograph leans against the gallery wall, yet the content of each is painfully aggressive. We are reminded of artists like Coco Fusco, Cildo Meireles and Ken Gonzalez-Day who have charted similar territories, recalibrating history with all its itinerant ugliness and violence, conflating public and private spaces to reflect a more authentic experience of the world.

Martinez’ immense sculptural work titled Who Killed Liberty, Can You Hear That, It’s The Sound Of Inevitability, The Sound Of Your Death (2012) literally pierces the gallery wall leading from the main space into the adjacent project room. It operates as a “fallen angel,” revealing to us our own human shortcomings and inadequacies. A mirror, affixed to the bottom of the massive work and in which we cannot help but find our own faces, is also angled awkwardly toward the ceiling, further skewing our perceptions of ourselves. Lady Liberty appears thus truncated, profoundly damaged and crumbling as though the weight of today’s fractured political climate were dragging her down. In addition, a gold-plated multiple edition of the statue further collapses “liberty” with commodification, as though our basic human, and supposedly inalienable rights, i.e., life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, can be bought and sold at a price, thus completely nullifying their original meaning.

Ultimately, Martinez suggests that democracy and all it once stood for is broken in much the same way our collective human consciousness and our bodies are ailing, yet we are trapped inside them and all we have created. Liberty is in the final devastating throes of her own death. This politically charged symbol appears to be languishing in her own liminal and uncertain transformation, and perhaps all of us on the planet are headed toward the same ambiguous, painful end.

– Eve Wood

September 1, 2012
Nothing to Buy
Documenta 13

More than 30 venues—166 international artists within a few square miles—a forum for ideas rather than conspicuous consumption: it’s Documenta 13! Held every five years in Kassel, Germany, and founded in 1955 by Arnold Bode, an art professor and designer from Kassel, this is the world’s most important and enduring contemporary art show. Depending on the curatorial vision of the exhibition organizer(s) that shape the content, you might encounter a scolding, pedantic treatise on colonialism, or a Teutonic, oppressively intellectual “march-of-death” experience. Thanks to American-born artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, this iteration of Documenta was accessible to nearly anyone with interest in the larger world around us, and provided conceptually rich art while also feeding the senses. The overarching theme of the mega-exhibition was “bearing witness,” with all that the phrase implies.

Museum Fridericianum, 2012, Museum Fridericianum, 2012, photo by Nils Klinger © dOCUMENTA (13)

Don’t get me wrong: I love art fairs and revel in such market-driven events. But after the parties and the bright shiny happy pretty things, Documenta was the perfect antidote. Where else in the world could you see, under the same roof, one-quarter of all the ancient carved-stone “Bactrian Princesses” known to exist in the world, then go to debate the relationship between art and philosophy in a closed seminar? The exquisite Earth Goddess-like sculptures from Central Asia date back to the 2nd millennium B.C. and were borrowed from a private collection; the seminar was German philosopher Christoph Menke’s “What is Thinking? Or a Taste That Hates Itself,” held on Tuesdays from 11–1 p.m. in one of the galleries at the Fridericianum museum, the main Documenta venue. This brings a saying to mind: the French eat; the Italians make love; and the Germans think.

Among the most memorable projects was Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz’s installation, featuring shards from the destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan (“All we are breaking are stones”); the burnt remains of books ravaged when the Fridericianum was bombed by the Allies in 1941, and deemed too unimportant to restore; as well as beautiful stone books symbolizing the lost volumes carved by contemporary Afghani carvers using stones quarried at Bamiyan. The emotional impact of this powerful installation was that of a body blow, as our complicity in the destruction of cultural treasures crept into conscience like a bad memory. The title of Rakowitz’s installation (What dust will rise from one horseman?) was taken from an Afghan proverb on cooperation.

Michael Rakowitz, “What Dust Will Rise?,” 2012, Commissioned and produced by Documenta 13 with the support of Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, and Lombard Freid Projects, New York, courtesy the artist; Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris; Lombard Freid Projects, New York, photo by Roman März.

At the Neue Galerie Kassel, Sanja Ivekovic’s “The Disobedient (The Revolutionaries),” 2012, was a stand-out. The Croatian artist assembled plush toy donkeys of all eras, shapes and sizes, and displayed them in a glass case, capturing the attention of hordes of German schoolchildren touring through the galleries. (Note to self: art education is alive and well in Europe!) The piece provided a great example of an artwork that is cute on the surface but has a dark underbelly: adults were absorbed by the text on the opposite wall, describing the political protestors and martyrs symbolized by each cute lil’ stuffed animal, from Anna Mae Aquash to Primo Levi—a broad international assortment of political protestors who died because they were stubborn—like donkeys are reputed to be.

Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s wonderful sound installation “Forest (for a thousand years)” featured a recording of a choral piece sung by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, set in a glade deep in the recesses of the landscaped Karlsaue Park. Speakers were hung in the trees surrounding the tree-trunk stool seating arranged in the center of the clearing, and if you found your way there through the mud, your reward was 25 minutes of transcendent, blissful listening to a composition by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Cardiff and Miller had another site-specific installation at Documenta, in Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof train station. The “Alter Bahnhof Video Walk” used augmented reality to guide audiences on an engaging walk through the station. After borrowing an iPod from an office inside the station, you were told to take a seat on a bench and wait. As you held the media player in front of you, Cardiff guided you on a walking tour through the station as various video and audio vignettes unfurled. You proceeded as directed, often wheeling around since the recorded events were both mundane and convincingly realistic—people running to catch trains, a dog barking, a baby crying. At one point, Cardiff guided viewers to one of the train platforms, the same platform where Nazis loaded victims onto cars bound for the concentration camps. At another point, Cardiff stopped the narration and “turned off” the video at the request of a mysterious man who preferred to remain incognito.

The tour ended with a duet dance performance, a wonderful chance encounter made all the more powerful by Cardiff and Miller’s playful manipulation of temporality. At Documenta 13 there was nothing to buy—just pure experience to remind you what contemporary art can be.

September 1, 2012
THE ROAD TO DOCUMENTA

I’ve been warned that Llyn Foulkes is preparing furiously for “Documenta 13” and as I get in touch to arrange a meeting, I’m wary, in part, due to his reputation for fractious soliloquies regarding fellow artists, critics, art magazines, and in general, the art world cliques that hold him at arm’s length. By his own account, Foulkes has been an outsider, a talented iconoclast shunned by the powers that anoint the grand artists of the day. Foulkes’ auto-scribed narrative is the continuous subtext for his meandering commentary on the art world, a surging tide of cynicism and discontent which is incongruously and entirely enmeshed with Foulkes’ innocence, and even naivety and idealism. These qualities mix in an uneasy boil beneath the surfaces of his eye-popping, sometimes disorienting tableaux, which are fueled by his encompassing world view and his obsession with politics, money, power, and his negotiation with culture in a broad sense. Foulkes’ work incorporates material derived from his personal life to the extent that figures and vignettes that loosely represent his lurking presence populate his paintings. He cannot help but put himself into his work. His vision reflects a deep suspicion of power and a sense of alienation: the individual alone, standing outside of society, editorializing on and defying the conventional wisdom.
Despite declaring himself the odd man out, this is Foulkes’ moment. Although he has shown regularly in Los Angeles since the early 1960s and has had many moments over the years, he has never been in the spotlight as much as he is now. His inclusion in the 2009 Hammer Museum show “Nine Lives: Visionary Artists From L.A.,” in his view, set him up for the Venice Biennale last year, and “Documenta 13” this year. And in 2013, Foulkes will have a retrospective at the Hammer Museum.

Llyn Foulkes, Installation view from Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A., March 8 – May 31, 2009, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.

When I meet with Foulkes at his studio, I find him engaging and charming. He is entirely open and hungry for conversation. Given his reputation, and our somewhat uneasy initial phone contact, I am a bit surprised. Embarking on a freewheeling discussion, we sit down at his workbench. “What do you want to see?” he asks. Then, “See this?” He directs my attention to a small construction on the wall behind me. It is about 4-x-4 foot by my estimation, and as I take it in, the image begins to register to me: A woman is curled up on a bed, cradling a shiny egg-shaped object. Foulkes’ double, his pictorial incarnation, sits in bed next to her reading the paper. The funky surfaces of fabric and carpet, and Foulkes’ manipulations of space play tricks on my eyes, and the whole thing seems to quiver. Foulkes started The Awakening when he began to feel his marriage was over, and it is a painting that enjoys legendary status. It is the same piece he pulled from a show at Patricia Faure Gallery in the mid-’90s after it was up for only a week because Foulkes said, “It wasn’t done.” This is what he has been laboring over for “Documenta 13,” the 18-year painting, or thereabouts, but now it is less than half its original size. Foulkes also showed The Awakening in “Nine Lives: Visionary Artists From L.A.” at the Hammer in 2009. In the exhibition essay, Hammer curator Ali Subotnick wrote that Foulkes felt pressure to capitalize on the success generated by his work in the 1992 MOCA exhibit, “Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 1990s.” He responded to the pressure by exhibiting a painting that wasn’t resolved.
Foulkes still isn’t done with the piece. He begins to explain some of the changes he has made recently, describing how each choice creates a cascading effect, before he finally gives up in resignation, saying, “All these decisions are being made very quickly, at the end. There was a thing here before,” he indicates a place on the painting, “and you know… ah, I don’t want to get into it.”
“This painting started at nine feet. It was nine feet.” Foulkes slows his voice, drawing out the word nine. “This painting is now just this big.” And he gestures with his hands to indicate the shrinkage. “I told Documenta I would finish it,” he laughs, somewhat ruefully, “and then I started changing everything.”
Up close, I notice the eyes are Phillips head screws; the flat surface reflects light. The tapered body of the screw recedes into the intricately formed eye sockets of the figures. The screw heads cast a small shadow and create remarkable depth. Reflecting on what I had read about this piece, I comment on what I expect are fictional elements in this narrative, and Foulkes answers without hesitation, “The whole thing is fiction.” Then he shifts immediately into a discussion about engineering the piece, talking about all the changes he still needs to make. “What I’ve been trying to do for a long time,” he continues, “is to make a really dimensional painting. You never see it done so much with anything that has figures in it; it is usually done in abstract. You take a shape and you say, ‘this is bending this way; I have to curve this, that way.’ And it keeps changing.” Foulkes wants very much to be done with it, to put it, and what it represents, behind him—yet he can’t seem to let it go.

Llyn Foulkes, Dali and Me, 2006, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Foulkes pours the kind of detailed craftsmanship into his work that some might consider the result of obsessive or stultifying perfectionism. He comments on the importance of keeping his hand in his work, saying, “I believe very much in process, because I believe that you really grow in process.” Rather than hiring assistants, he needs to contend with the work himself. “It’s easy to have somebody else make it for you,” he explains. “You change things, and things happen, and you discover things.”
Then, as though all the talk of changing his painting has made him tired, he declares, “But my machine, I don’t have to worry about that. You’ve seen the machine before?” I assure him that I have and recount the first time I saw him perform. We step into the “Church of Art,” the space adjacent to his studio where he performs. The machine, a self-contained hybrid instrument, a one-man band with drums, percussion, horns, and a bass guitar string that Foulkes plays with his feet, is lit with spots and amplified with microphones plugged into a PA system.
Foulkes tells me he’s packing the whole thing up and shipping it to Germany for “Documenta 13,” where he’ll be performing. He points out that although he’s driven it to San Francisco and all over Southern California in his van, he’s never shipped it anywhere, and that makes him nervous. “At first, I wanted to go on the cargo plane,” he says. “I wanted to be the escort so if it went down, I would go down with it. I could never recreate it!”
He has taken off his shoes and slid onto the seat, getting ready to play. I ask if the various horns and bells came from salvage yards. “They’ve been from salvage places, some were from Cost Plus.” He hits a bell lightly with his mallet and it rings with a warm sound that brightens up the space. We continue talking as Foulkes breaks into fragments of songs to expand on his answers. He seems lightened and relatively untroubled as he works the machine and sings. Clearly he enjoys this, and I wonder aloud if he feels free of his inner critic when he is playing. “I have an inner critical voice with the machine,” he responds, “it better be damn good. When it’s really rolling along, I feel every part of my body is in tune.”

Llyn Foulkes live at Church Of Art, photo by Iva Hladis ©2008

Toward the end of our conversation I note that he has expressed disappointment in various interviews over the amount of recognition he has received. I ask how much is enough. It is rhetorical, and perhaps unfair, but I ask anyway. “How much is enough?” he repeats. “Yeah, I know,” he reflects, “I do have that problem. You see, it all comes from when I was a child.” He begins playing again, building into a song. “When I was a baby, my Daddy left me; he said, ‘I’m going down to California, with a banjo on my knee.’ So I made my daddies up – from the picture shows, from the face that grows from the picture shows…” Foulkes explains that as a child he felt the only way he would be loved was to be famous. “I’ve never gotten over it. As much as I try, I still haven’t gotten over it. So you say, ‘How much is enough?’ I don’t know.”

Coming soon: “Llyn Foulkes: A Retrospective,” February 3–May 19, 2013, at the Hammer Museum, for more info: hammer.ucla.edu

Below: Llyn Foulkes, The Lost
Frontier,1997–2005, courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

July 22, 2012
MIKE KELLEY: STRAIGHT OUTTA DETROIT

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! ART STAR STOPS MAKING ART!
That was going to be my headline after hearing the remark Mike Kelley made at the close of our interview.

I was wrapping up our conversation, all ready to ask the final question, like Barbara Walters: “What’s next, Mike?” But before I could, Kelley preempted me: “I’ve been working nonstop for years and years, and now I’m not in the mood to make art. I’m trying to slow down.”

Considering he was just back from his London show with Gagosian Gallery, and that that very week his Destroy All Monsters noise/art band group show at Prism gallery in Los Angeles was being installed, maybe he was just plain worn out, and perhaps being a little melodramatic. He continued, “I have a lot of things I have to do, like a big survey show that’s coming up in 2012; it’s traveling. And some other shows that have been scheduled for a long time. I just did two shows this year, and big-scale shows. So I just want to stop for a couple of years.”

It got quiet toward the end of our interview, and if I didn’t know better, I might even say he seemed a bit melancholy that late morning. It’s true, Los Angeles-based artist Kelley has been making art for a long, long time. So to say he’s taking a break is something akin to Duchamp’s famous hiatus from making art to play professional chess.

But stop making art? I hate to break the news to him, but it’s doubtful: He’s in the Whitney Biennial (for the eighth time) this year with an ongoing project. (More on this later.) That doesn’t sound much like taking a break.

Known for his stuffed-animal sculptures and his wry text drawings, his performance art, his videos, his musical activities and his writing, Kelley is arguably one of the most influential living artists, and I’ve been wanting to feature him in Artillery for some time now.

Mike Kelley, Kandor 14, 2011, photo by Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of Mike Kelley and Gagosian Gallery.

Kelley finally agreed to an interview, but only reluctantly. Last issue, our gossip columnist got carried away, and Kelley was not happy with what he took to be gratuitous character assassination. But he honored his word and met with me anyway, and I couldn’t help but be impressed by his integrity.

Kelley invited me to meet him at his office, which is actually his former studio/home, located in Highland Park on the eastside of Los Angeles. It still has the feel of a home—it actually is a house—as you enter at the back through an alley. I opened the wooden screen door to a bright spotless kitchen with shiny green tiles. Assistants were buzzing from one room to another.

Kelley greeted me as he was hastily finishing a piece of toast, which may have served as his breakfast. Casually dressed, with short-cropped graying hair, his intense blue eyes seldom caught mine. He was gracious though, and asked me if I wanted a cup of tea as he led me to the front living room, where the curtains remained drawn. There were two modern L-shaped couches and a coffee table in the middle with one lone ashtray that looked like it hadn’t seen a cigarette in a long time. There was a large Lari Pittman on one wall, on another leaned a tall pink John McCracken, and the adjacent wall had an army-green James Hayward frosting painting hanging near the front door. He told me Hayward was an old friend to whom he would be forever indebted to for recommending him for his first teaching job in Minneapolis. This ultimately led to his professorial career of over 30 years in Southern California, where he has developed a following among students who, in turn, have perpetuated his influence in the contemporary art world.

DETROIT

Mike Kelley was raised Catholic and attended Catholic School— any Kelley aficionado knows this, as Catholicism is frequently addressed in his work. So I decided to start from the beginning. When I asked him if he ever believed in Heaven and Hell, he responded deliberately, in his deep, gravelly Detroit accent, “No. I never believed in anything.” He seemed sad when he said that, with a faraway look in his eyes. Even as a child, he said he never bought into the Catholic Church: “No. I never believed in it at all. I was stuck in it. It was pounded into me, but I wasn’t indoctrinated. I suffered because I felt that something was wrong with me. I thought I should believe, and I just couldn’t understand why I didn’t.”

Aha! There’s the Catholic guilt!

But even in the first grade, Kelley told me, he remembers thinking that religion “was a load of shit.” I envisioned a tiny kid saying “This is a load of shit!”

He grew up in a working class suburb of Detroit. His father was the head of maintenance in the local public school system, his mother a cook at the Ford Motor Company cafeteria. Kelley first knew he wanted to be an artist at age 13. He went directly from high school to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, then to CalArts. This trajectory suggested to me that he might have come from a supportive family that embraced his becoming an artist. He laughed for a long time, as if in slow motion, even a little maniacally. Then he stopped abruptly and corrected me. “No, my family did not support me in my interest in the arts. My parents were both really against it. My father basically disowned me.”

Kelley described his getaway plan back then. “Because otherwise I was going to go crazy. I was going to die. I actually had a nervous breakdown. I had no option, I had to leave my town. I would have been working in a local auto parts store for the rest of my life.” He paused, with those faraway eyes again, and added as an important afterthought: “I chose art, not to become successful, because you couldn’t make a living from being an artist at that time. It was a profession I chose specifically in order to be a failure.” This is a poignant statement, considering the nature of the art world today. Artists in the past truly were rebels and iconoclasts, not career-driven puppets.

In his early days, before Cal- Arts, Kelley delved into what was around him, incorporating his life into his art. “I was interested in hippie anarchist culture—in Detroit and Ann Arbor, that meant the White Panther Party. They put on concerts and poetry readings; they wrote manifestos about how bad capitalism was. I read John Sinclair’s writings, and I said to myself, these people are like me! I’m not crazy!” He explored the avant-garde and was deeply influenced by Dada. “The psychedelic underground was just an extension of the historical avant-garde. And I decided that I should be an artist—either that or a writer. I was particularly inspired by the writings of William Burroughs.

“When I was in high school, a group of students formed a recycling center. There was no organized recycling at that time. Working at that center, I discovered that there was a world of magazines about culture. I ripped articles out of these, and I basically taught myself about contemporary art. When I went to college, I was much more knowledgeable about it than the other students.” Smashing cans and breaking glass… and reading Dada! Mike Kelley learned about contemporary art in a dumpster, basically.

In junior high, Kelley switched from parochial to public school and acquired two art teachers. “One of my high school art teachers was a real macho guy. His paintings looked like Francis Bacon’s. The second art teacher was a closeted gay man; he had to be closeted, I don’t think an openly gay man would have been allowed to teach in the public school system at that time. He taught the craft classes,” which Kelley says he wasn’t into. But he took Kelley to exhibits and “This man was my replacement father. I won a statewide student arts award and had to go to a dinner ceremony in another city. This man went with me instead of my parents. I recall that everyone laughed when I introduced him as my teacher, because you were supposed to have brought your parents.”

It seemed to all come together right there, all the strands of his rambling and transgressive career gathered in the story of his Midwestern upbringing: the Catholic-school trauma, his teenage White Panther experience, and the tutelage of his latent- homosexual high school crafts teacher who took him to art exhibits. Roll this all into one ball, and you have the artist Mike Kelley!

CALARTS

Mike Kelley might not be a household name, like his contemporaries Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons. It would also be difficult to lump him in with that crowd aesthetically. For one thing, Kelley was doing performance art in the ’70s, which was way more subversive than the fine arts scene at that time. He performed with underground rock musicians. His work was unconventional, unmarketable and uncategorical. Kelley stayed in LA, when his above-mentioned peers went to New York to pursue conventional art careers.

Kelley had and continues to have a name around town—from mentor to comrade—and being from Los Angeles is definitely a factor in Kelley’s sensibility—along with Detroit, always Detroit.

A lot of Kelley’s work draws from personal history, and one as rich as his would seem to provide endless material. He shrugged his shoulders when I remarked upon this but was willing to see where I was going. I asked him if he was from a dysfunctional family.

“All nuclear families are dysfunctional,” he replied. “That’s my belief.” Then he paused. “My family wasn’t dysfunctional in the sense I was beaten or abused, but my mother was a complete control freak. She wanted to control everybody’s life, and it caused a lot of psychic damage. I’d say that my mother was a phallic mother, and my father was just in the background.”

Kelley was the baby of four children in a family of six and describes himself as “the troublemaker. In my family, art was considered to be what communists and homosexuals did.”

So your family didn’t understand you at all? “No, no. I was a Martian.” Kelley repeats this with a combination of nonchalance and conviction. “A Martian, a commie and a fag.”

I pointed out that that sounded pretty damn dysfunctional, maybe even abusive. He neither agreed nor disagreed.

So Kelley got the hell outta Dodge as soon as he could. He went straight to Ann Arbor “because that’s where all the freaks were. When I decided to go to graduate school, the only two schools I applied to were CalArts and the Art Institute of Chicago.”

Kelley decided on CalArts mainly because Alan Kaprow was on the faculty. “But when I got there, he was gone,” he said. “CalArts was really focused on New York. Students went to New York City as soon as they graduated; instead, I was driving into Los Angeles and checking it out and discovering a really interesting art scene. I met artists my age, especially coming out of Otis, people like Bruce Yonemoto and Jeffrey Vallance. I met Chris Burden, Alexis Smith and artists of that generation as well.”

The Los Angeles art scene was much younger then, and more intimate. “There were very, very few galleries and no contemporary art museum. But there were alternative spaces, and as soon as I graduated, I became involved with LACE. I was on the committees for many years programming shows and events.”

STUFFED ANIMALS

My first real encounter with Kelley’s work was at Rosamund Felsen gallery on La Brea back in the late ’80s. The piece was a tattered worn blanket with grimy stuffed animals placed in the corners. Above it were black-and-white snapshots of people smearing chocolate (one hoped), on the same blanket, using the stuffed animal as props.

I had never seen anything like it before and it made a huge impression on me. I assumed Kelley was thumbing his nose at the art world, but he rejected that theory. He told me it was the first series of work that made money for him. “I realized it was simply the subject matter. It wasn’t my intention that I hooked into this weird thing about hearth and home. People are so invested in their childhood.”

Kelley was a little perplexed by this back then, because that’s really not what the work was about. “I didn’t make that work for that reason. It surprised me. And that’s what led me to go on to do this work about life-repressed memory syndrome.”

A lot of Kelley’s work invokes psychotherapy, so I had to ask if he’s been in therapy. “I’ve been in therapy, off and on, most of my life. I also studied psychology in school and I read deeply on the subject. I’ve always been very interested in it.”

When I asked if he thought therapy was a scam, he answered without a beat, “Yes. But it’s a scam you need at the time.”

GAGOSIAN

Kelley’s work today sells for as much as a million dollars in auctions. I congratulated him on this apparent mark of success. “I don’t follow auctions, ” Kelley responded. “The galleries do that, I don’t want to know how much my work goes for.”

Granted, Kelley never sees any of that money if it changes hands in secondary market auctions, but the mere fact of the sale should boost the price of one’s current artwork, shouldn’t it? He responded dutifully, “It could, or could not. It might up the value of that particular period of my work. I have works that sell for tremendous amounts of money, and others that I can’t sell at all. I’m not necessarily going to capitalize on an inflated auction sale, that’s what I’m telling you.”

It seemed strange to me that, for such an abrasively uncommercial artist, success had found him. “Now that you’re with Larry Gagosian, you must feel like you’ve made it to the top,” I said.

“That’s a long story,” Kelley replied. “Mark Francis, who works at the Gagosian gallery in London, is a fan of my work. He invited me to mount a show there. This was when I was working on ‘Day Is Done’ [a feature film installation]. I had decided to leave Metro Pictures in New York, after showing there for over 20 years. I was locked into the gallery pecking order, and I realized I was never going to do better in New York if I didn’t switch galleries. At some point I said to Mark, ‘Day Is Done’ is a big show, on the scale of a museum show, it’s a waste to present it in London. I want to show it in the New York gallery. Surprisingly, they agreed to this. It was a real gamble. But luckily it worked out. The show was very successful and radically changed my reception in New York.”

Kelley showed with top LA galleries early on. He started with Mizuno Gallery, Rosamund Felsen, then Patrick Painter. Then Gagosian.

Larry Gagosian is known for his empire of 11 international galleries and a strict business approach to art, therefore it wasn’t surprising to hear Kelley say, “Gagosian Gallery, unlike other galleries I have shown with, is not very familial. I knew most of the artists at Metro Pictures personally. Gagosian is run in a much more businesslike way. Artists come and go.”

Mike Kelley in his outside studio in Highland Park, December 2011, photo by Tyler Hubby

ONE MONTH LATER

When we went to shoot photos of Kelley, he seemed much more upbeat. He even brought along the striped shirt I suggested, similar to the one he wore in a youthful photograph included in Dirty, the Sonic Youth album he designed. That’s when he sprang his Detroit project on me, something he’s been working on for several years.

I reminded him that he said he was going to stop making art.He just mumbled something, then stared into the camera.

It didn’t seem the right time to talk about the project, so I arranged a phone interview. Two weeks later, I asked him, “What’s this Detroit project Mike?”

“I’ve been working on it for years. I wanted to work with a real structure, so I wanted to try to buy my childhood home,” he told me over the phone.

This is something you forgot to tell me? I scream to myself.

The Detroit project, it turns out, may be Kelley’s magnum opus. To explain it as best I can, Kelley returned to the Detroit suburb of his childhood and tried to buy the house where he grew up, in order to create a site-specific work. But the homeowner wasn’t interested, and after exploring other options, Kelley settled for replicating his home (after a fashion).

The structure will be built on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. It will be a replica of his home but with a forbidden extension; a basement, two stories deep, each level mimicking the floor plan above, evoking dungeon labyrinths.

All these elements are still on the drawing board. What Kelley has completed so far is a façade of his house—a sort of detachable face, about the size of a mobile home, that can be placed on and off a truck. (The façade is not simply a flat wall, but a three dimensional unit that fits onto the main structure.) The piece is called Mobile Homestead, and two expeditions have already taken place, starting from MOCAD and ending at the Kelley home in Westland, which resulted in two documentary films which will debut at the Whitney Biennial this year.

This had all started as a project that Kelley wanted to do for personal reasons, not for public exhibition. But when Artangel, a London-based arts-funding organization, offered to sponsor the project, along with MOCAD, Kelley made some revisions and compromises and basically found himself doing public art, foregoing the original game plan.

The Detroit project is almost too fraught with psychology and dysfunction. The basements, the tunnels, the mazes—way too Freudian, even for me. But there it is.

Kelley continues to talk about this project as a public piece that was never meant to be public. Kelley left Detroit, but did he really leave it behind? He says the stuffed animals had nothing to do with childhood. (Really?) He says he needs to stop making art for a while, but now he’s working on a huge project that could be one of his most important pieces to date.

I think Kelley’s intended hiatus was just wishful thinking. His work is about personal history, his childhood, his hometown, psychology and dysfunction—things that could easily feel like an emotional burden. But as Kelley told me, being a conceptual artist is about ideas—and how does one shut those down?

The Stedelijk Museum is organizing “MIKE KELLEY: Themes and Variations from 35 Years,” scheduled to open at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in December 2012. After Amsterdam the show is expected to travel to: Centre Pompidou, Paris; MOCA, LA; and MoMA PS1, New York.

See Mike Kelley’s work in the Whitney Biennial 2012 opening March 1, 2012. www.whitney.org

Find Artillery: Killer Text on Art at your local bookstores or newsstands nationwide. You’ll find Artillery at Barnes & Noble bookstores too. Or Subscribe online.

January 3, 2012
Editor’s Letter

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ARTILLERY! 5 YEARS OLD!

ANNIVERSARIES MARK cycles, patterns, reasons to keep going. If you make it one year, you might as well go another. All of a sudden, it’s five years. Now you’re committed. I could apply that logic to quitting smoking (which I did) and to startingArtillery.

My soon-to-be co-founder said, “Let me finish my book, and I’ll help you start your art magazine.” But it was what he said afterward — “Remember, once you start, you can never go back” — that still echoes in my mind today.

Amid my paranoia and delusions of grandeur, we did put out our debut issue of Artillery, with Paul Takizawa as art director and my husband, Charles Rappleye, as publisher. I didn’t know what Artillerywas yet. I was just making art, only with words and a computer. Our first issue featured Catherine Opie breast-feeding her son. It’s a famous photo now. I think Regen Projects never forgave us for that. We didn’t know any better, really. We butchered the image. We cropped the hell outta it, blew it up, overlaid type, put another image by Opie on top of it — everything imaginable that was against all the rules. If you’re reading this, Cathy, please forgive us, for we knew not better.

After Opie, there was an artist, Andrew Krasnow, who used human skin as his medium. He made an American flag out of flesh — dyed red, white and blue. He held his “flag” to the camera, and that ended up as our third cover. That seemingly patriotic image, with our logo — just the word “artillery” — made it clear to us that it wasn’t clear to others what the magazine was all about. And that is when — many miles from Miami, on our way home to Los Angeles in a rented car after our first art fair — the subtitle “Killer Text on Art” was conceived.

We steadily built an audience and started to make our presence felt. We changed printers after we were censored twice (thanks to David Humphrey’s visual column, New York Barrage). By then, there were two other start-up art magazines published in LA — one is gone now, but the other remains. After our lone ex–LA Weekly sales rep stopped showing up and started signing his e-mails “God Bless You,” we weren’t entirely sure what our fate would be. Then came Paige Wery (dare I thank God?), who became our publisher in January 2008.

Paige coming onboard felt like our second act, along with the arrival of our creative director, Bill Smith, who joined us around the same time. Bill brought skills honed at Mean magazine and a new look, cleaner and slicker, while Paige took over advertising and pushed us from 64 to 80 pages, and today 96 pages. Our events and her Live Art Debates make her a tour de force and someone to be reckoned with — just ask our advertisers! She’s made Artillery a staple at art fairs and helped establish us as LA’s premier contemporary art magazine.

The beginning of our fifth year could open our third act. That sounds a bit premature, but we feel confident the best is yet to come; with several new writers and editors, the Artillery team just keeps getting stronger.

Thank you, Los Angeles art galleries, dealers and institutions. You made us what we are today. Without your support, there would be no Artillery. And thanks to all of my loyal contributors, who excel with their writing skills and pitches and stay on top of it. I definitely couldn’t do it without you.

And finally, to you, my dear readers — who else would I write this letter to? I thank you for sticking around, because we’re sticking around too.

—Tulsa Kinney

September 1, 2011
Fashionably Macabre

Of course I knew of bad-boy provocateur Alexander McQueen’s reputation as a brilliant couturier, with words like “artist” used to describe him, but such hyperbole is thrown about willy-nilly in the fashion world, and I just assumed it was an exaggerated way of saying he was really talented. “Savage Beauty,” the exhibition, which spans McQueen’s 19-year career at the Metropolitan Museum, changed my mind.

An unlikely fashion darling, McQueen triumphed in that difficult world by dint of hard work and amazing talent. But he never seemed dazzled by it all, maintaining a healthy cynicism throughout his career. Working class and overweight (he did eventually slim down), McQueen was also gay, which must have been a burden growing up in London’s tough East End. Thrice an outsider, McQueen developed within his steely self a rare empathy with the downtrodden and outcast and a richly honed perspective that made him constantly question the status quo.

There is no shortage of beautiful clothes showcasing McQueen’s renowned tailoring skill in the first couple of rooms. These are clothes with attitude, referencing S&M mixed up with Victorian romanticism. McQueen liked his women fierce and viewed his designs as a kind of armor that would shield and empower them.

Cabinet of Curiosity

It is in the room “The Cabinet of Curiosities” where things get really interesting. Here shelves and niches along the wall display some of McQueen’s more outré dress designs and various accessories, shoes and headgear he created in collaboration with jewelers and milliners. There are also videos of his fashion shows. These extravagant spectacles, with their bizarre take on beauty, enigmatic story lines and over-the-top garments and makeup, reminded me immediately of Matthew Barney, not in a derivative way, but in a parallel way. One dress with an anatomically correct lilac leather bustier atop a wide horsehair skirt, matching leather hood and horsehair “pony tail” was particularly Cremaster-worthy. Though I could find no paper trail connecting the two, I am sure they knew each other and were members of a mutual admiration society. McQueen collaborated early on with Björk, Barney’s wife, and both men, as part of their explorations into the nature of beauty, used the double-amputee model Aimee Mullins in their work. The beautiful carved wood boots McQueen designed for her (that many in the fashion world initially took for conventional boots, as opposed to prosthetics) are on display here.

Another dress, with a splatter design of paint, is exhibited next to a video showing its creation during a fashion show. Two robots shoot paint at the model as she revolves on a stand between them. Loaned by an Italian auto factory, the robots are sinister, Transformer-like with their wildly waving robotic arms — you can only imagine how nervous you’d feel sitting in the audience waiting for them to turn on you. Still another dress features a carved balsa wood skirt that flares out to at least four feet in back.

There’s a carved wood Chinese village headdress, which I imagine would be much like wearing a dollhouse on one’s head: a twiggy, upside-down nest of a “fascinator” composed of enormous porcupine quills and many examples of McQueen’s extreme footwear, including the notorious hoof-like clodhopper known as “the armadillo.” One of the real highlights is an incredible metal ribcage and vertebrae complete with curling tailbone. It’s a gorgeous piece of stand-alone sculpture. Seeing it as a kind of body art that someone would wear sparks an unsettling visceral reaction. I overheard one viewer remark: “It’d be tough going to the theater in that one.” I know she was making a joke, but she got to the crux of the matter. None of these items were really meant for public consumption; they were made for the runway and are part of the statement McQueen was making about his vision and himself. Yes, they were powerful marketing tools, and some may shy away from the overt commercialism that suggests, but they fulfill my criteria for art.

Alexander McQueen, gallery view, The Romantic Mind

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I think my favorite part was the Romantic Exoticism section, which featured extraordinary embroidery. At Givenchy, McQueen became exposed to the rarefied world of haute couture, embracing many of its techniques and tempering somewhat the fierceness of his designs. One beautifully tailored dress, a combination kimono and straitjacket, was particularly powerful, speaking volumes about fashion and its subjugation of women. Here too was a hilarious East-meets-West amalgam, a playful silk romper complete with an obi worn with American football shoulder pads and helmet painted with delicate Japanese designs.

McQueen took inspiration for his shows from film, history, art, African tribal garb and nature. His Scottish heritage figured prominently in his work, in particular the centuries of oppression that occurred there at the hands of the English. McQueen incorporated feathers, horns, shells, bird skulls and caiman heads into his clothes, and in one of his final shows, “Plato’s Atlantis,” he developed a technique where digital images of animals and insects were woven into fabric.

One of his more provocative explorations of beauty and ugliness was inspired by a Joel-Peter Witkin photograph featuring a grotesque image of a fat, naked woman wearing a weird, fetishistic full-face mask and breathing through a tube. McQueen incorporated it into his 2001 Voss fashion show, which took place inside a giant mirrored box that reflected the appearance-conscious audience’s images back to them as they arrived. For the finale, the mirrored glass walls of a second box at the center of the room came crashing down, revealing a tableau vivant re-creation of the photograph. In this setting, where beauty had just been the focal point for the greater part of an hour, it must have been immensely shocking. It was pure McQueen. As he once said, “I don’t want to do a cocktail party, I’d rather people left my shows and vomited. I prefer extreme reactions.” But in this case, there was more to it than that, because it strikes me as intensely personal knowing McQueen’s own status as outsider.

McQueen was fascinated with death; morbid themes are constant in his oeuvre. Early on in his career, in a nod to Victorian funerary jewelry, McQueen included a lock of his hair as part of the label in each garment. At one fashion show in a church, he placed a skeleton in a front-row seat, and he topped an opulent ostrich-feather evening gown with a bodice of laboratory slides on which fake blood had been painted. What is remarkable about this dress, and all the rest for that matter, is that, despite these unorthodox materials, McQueen never sacrificed design or beauty, and so the end result is absolutely stunning. You’d never think the shimmering rectangles were anything but over-scaled pailettes unless you read the description.

The catalog accompanying the Met show features an eerie hologram on its cover, which changes back and forth between McQueen’s face and a skull. The catalog is unique in that photographer Sølve Sundsbø shot the garments on live models and subsequently manipulated the images to make them look like mannequins, complete with joints. There is a veracity to how the clothing looks on the body and an eeriness to the living flesh, supported by real muscle and bone, transformed into lacquered fiberglass.

One comes away from the exhibition very moved by the depth of McQueen’s passion, his incredible imagination and his pain. He was a fragile soul, committing suicide in February 2010, nine days after his mother succumbed to cancer and three years after his friend and champion, fashionista Isabelle Blow took her own life. McQueen burned with such intensity, producing two couture and two ready-to-wear lines every year, and presumably double that during his tenure at Givenchy; one feels he simply wore himself out. For McQueen, who was compelled to delve so deeply into his core for inspiration, the effort was enormously draining. Looking at his body of work, one is bowled over by the sheer beauty and creativity, but you can also clearly see the blood, sweat and tears writ large amid the satin and silk.

All images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

September 1, 2011
SOAP DISH

The mid-afternoon New York City traffic is uncharacteristically brisk on my way to interview performance artist Kalup Linzy. I arrive in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, half an hour early, with my photographer. Linzy greets us at his unmarked live-in work-space basement studio wearing a shiny dark gray satin shirt, white boxer shorts with orange and brown hibiscus flowers and a pair of rubber flip-flops.
Welcoming us in, he exclaims, “I know I told you 2 p.m., because The Bold and the Beautiful goes off at 2 o’clock.” Linzy pauses, “I mean, I can make exceptions.”

I am grateful, because this man is serious about his soaps. His most acclaimed work is a series of self-made soap opera videos, some of which are All My Churen, Da Young and da Mess and the ongoing serial “Conversations Wit de Churen.” They are equal parts gender-bending satire, daytime high drama and genuine heartfelt homage.

Kalup Linzy, “Keys to Our Heart,” 2008, still from digital video

Before excusing himself, Linzy announces that he’s going to make some popcorn because he has the munchies. He returns with a bag of microwave popcorn, wearing a brunette shoulder-length fuchsia-tipped wig. We want to take photos outside to catch some of the early spring light, but Linzy objects, “I can’t be going out like this; school will be getting out soon. I don’t want that kind of attention. You know how some high school boys can be.” He pauses, then adds, “But of course I’ll beat their ass!” The threat is difficult to believe. There is an easy grace about him: his newly added tresses framing his deep soulful eyes, his wide soft smile caressing the scruff of his beard.

Kalup Linzy, “Keys to Our Heart,” 2008, still from digital video

The wigs, high fashion and glamour that have become a hallmark of Linzy’s work don’t necessarily define his real world. “I’m not transgender; it’s not a lifestyle for me. I just use the aesthetic of drag in my work, but I don’t think I’m a drag artist either. I just decided consciously that whenever I was going to appear that I would be dressed up and performing because I think of myself as a guy who is pretty boring,” he says laughing. “I mean, that’s what the work is, but I didn’t necessarily want to be my characters from the videos. People are annoyed that it isn’t real, but I’m like ‘whatever — get ready!’ As people misunderstand, they’ll research my work more. There are many layers to a man putting on a dress. We’re all drag queens and drag kings, anybody who’s performing to create an identity.”

Linzy’s identity seems delightfully complex. He counts his influences as everything from daytime dramas, old black-and-white Hollywood movies, the romanticism of the Harlem Renaissance to Def Comedy Jam and the sitcoms of his childhood. He draws artistic inspiration from Andy Warhol, John Waters, Glenn Ligon and Lyle Ashton Harris. Munching on a handful of popcorn, Linzy muses, “When I was in college I had this Black Male Body book. I remember that exact moment I saw Lyle Ashton Harris, in like a tutu. I connected that to John Waters in my mind, and that sort of began to give me the freedom to do my work.”

Despite Linzy’s rather grand ascension into the art-world elite, he seems fairly unaffected by it. “I feel like the world is my art community anywhere I go. You hang out with the people that you’re around and working with and let the energy come and go. It’s like a fleeting experience. But I really do feel like the world is my home.” One of the “elite” that Linzy has been hanging out with recently is actor James Franco. They met in 2009 when Linzy was performing at a party for Art Basel Miami Beach. Last year, Franco asked Linzy to join him on General Hospital during his stint playing a deranged artist/serial killer, Robert “Franco” Frank. In an art-imitates-life twist, Linzy played Franco’s musical collaborator singer and performance artist, Kalup Ishmael.

This was a “full-circle moment” for Linzy: “I grew up wanting to be on a soap opera. I grew up wanting to be a filmmaker, a director and wanting to sing. I incorporate all this stuff into my art. So when somebody comes along like James Franco and says, ‘You wanna be on General Hospital?’, of course I’m going to say yes. The whole point of me doing the videos is because I didn’t think a soap opera could ever happen to someone like me. I didn’t believe it at first, but then I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really happening!’” Linzy is grinning. “It was a big event in my life! I had to rethink, because it really wasn’t supposed to happen in a million years. Especially because I had decided to be openly gay and not give a shit and instead just express it through my work. But it gave me the confidence to do more and follow more of my dreams.”

Linzy is reflective when talking about those early years growing up in Clermont, Florida. “When I started making art in my late 20s, I was confronted with things that I had missed or was missing, things I needed to confront and deal with. Like I grew up — my mother didn’t raise me. She was schizophrenic and on drugs for a period of time. I realized I had abandonment issues, but I would not deal with them. Moving to New York made me look that in the face. Just to really look at it and know how it affected things I did. It made me want to be a giver, to feel good about something. There are certain things that I didn’t get, and so I became more inclined when I was making my work to make something just for myself, or people who are like me to identify with and enjoy.”

Upon first impression, Linzy’s work may seem like zany high-camp performance art. It’s challenging to watch his soap opera video series and not get sucked in by the characters. You immediately want to tune in to the next episode and see how it all plays out — a common soap opera strategy. “In comedy, the tragedy happens first, and then the journey back from that is normally humorous, you know, to try to heal it,” Linzy says.

Kalup Linzy, Photo by Cecilia De Bucourt

High and low art brazenly crash into each other in Linzy’s work; any notion or division between the two is unimportant to him. While grateful for his success, he is unimpressed by art-world politics. “I remember being at MoMA, and I basically told the audience that I didn’t care what they thought, and I think people probably didn’t appreciate it too much, but I felt like I had to set myself free from these other people’s opinions. All they talked about was these crack addicts in the ’80s, but my mother was one. They talk about being gay, but I am one of them. They talk about being black, but that was me. Everything I felt I was a part of was being marginalized. I had to set myself free from all these opinions to be able to live.” Linzy pauses, becomes quiet and crumples up the popcorn bag. “It’s not the easiest thing. I think it’s important to care, but you have to have some kind of detachment at particular points in order to just survive and not emotionally kill yourself. The work became about my own healing and hopefully other people get something from that. I’ve done a good job with it. I’ve grown, and I’ve learned. It’s okay to let go of things you didn’t get and not dwell on it … and it’s okay to be liked. Everything doesn’t have to be so heavy all the time, you know. Early on I was just doing things so I could be accepted, but now my work is really about accepting myself.”

Linzy gets up and loads a dance mix on his laptop; the music floods the room. Suddenly we’re all up on our feet dancing and laughing. His words echo in my mind: “Everything doesn’t have to be so heavy all the time.” The photo shoot begins. Linzy serves up a powerful supermodel turn to the camera with an “I’ll beat your ass” diva glint in his eye, and suddenly I can plainly see a man in a wig who can take care of business if and when he needs to.

Greg Walloch is a writer and performer in Los Angeles. For more information, visit www.GregWalloch.com.

May 29, 2011
MILF AS MUSE

It is difficult to imagine John Currin’s work adorning walls more modest than those of the uptown Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan. Currin’s subjects have become progressively more well-heeled as his career has advanced. His signature subjects of yore—the ludicrously big-titted women and the frail women in bed and the nymphettes clinging adoringly to wilting bearded aesthetes—are a thing of the distant past; he has now entered a sphere of affluence commensurate with the incomes of the select few who can afford to collect his paintings, which now sell in the million-dollar range. And why shortchange him? He is one of the most interesting painters around, justifiably extolled for his technique. There are other comparably gifted modern masters (Vincent Desiderio, Lisa Yuskavage), but none who ply their exquisitely wrought brushstrokes in the service of perversity quite as cleverly as Currin.

Though they do not comprise the bulk of his oeuvre, it is Currin’s depictions of the sex lives of the rich and complacent—in which porno-derived tropes of the Sapphic variety are transposed to upscale surroundings—that receive the most attention. The most prominent piece at the recent Gagosian show, The Women of Franklin Street, was a celebration of afternoon delight in which three upper-crust MILFs pictured in the throes of self-congratulatory sensuality, pleasure one another in a sumptuously appointed living room. Foliage rustles against a paneled window and an immaculately wrought tea set occupies the foreground. Another work in a similar vein, The Conservatory, features an erotically abandoned nocturnal music practice with plenty of middle-aged spread spilling out of black lace lingerie, and clitoral stimulation tastefully concealed by skillfully rendered folds of drapery. These paintings verge upon the grotesque; they are neither aesthetically inviting to the viewer nor sympathetic to the subject, but they are provocative and they hold one’s eye.

Women of a certain age have long been Currin’s special province. Women, as he put it in a well-circulated quote that got him into a lot of the right kind of trouble, “caught between the object of desire and the object of loathing.” Women like the graying dowager in The Old Fur, who opens a fur coat to reveal a “well-preserved” body, while taking a wistful sidelong glance. Many of Currin’s women sport these wistful expressions, as if casting a backward melancholy eye at the pleasures of their youth.

It is easy to imagine Currin smiling to himself as he works, tickled by the nervous laughter his subtly incorrect depictions of the cultured classes are likely to induce in the beholder. His stance of sardonic ambiguity makes people a little uneasy, but he never lays it on so thick—the paint or the premise—that one can tell exactly where he’s coming from. He never quite crosses the line into caricature, though he comes close with a painting called Hotpants, which resembles a Norman Rockwell composition. It’s the one work in the show that features men, if you can call them that. A gauzily-painted ponce in tight shorts primps in front of a full-length mirror, while a similarly attired tailor fusses over him. The absurd vanity—and vulnerability—of those whose wealth has inoculated them against reality is often captured by Currin, as in the treacly Dogwood Thieves, wherein two blithe blondes bedizened in sun hats, ribbons and flowers luxuriate in stolen moments, blissfully impervious to worldly concerns.

A different kind of awriness pervades each painting. They are all a little “off’’ in one way or another, enough to make one wonder what’s “going on.” In Flora, a diaphanously-negligéed blonde reclines over a basket of fruit while disappearing into the corner of the painting at an angle that throws the viewer off, while Big Hands appears to be a straightforward portrait of an attractive blonde, until one notices her thick masculine arms and hands. And what’s with the portrait of Constance Towers?

There are an abundance of blondes and strawberry blondes on display, but the brunettes steal the show. Here, with two paintings, Mademoiselle and The Reader, Currin further muddies the issue by playing it straight. With these simple renderings of women lost in seductive abstraction, he arrives at an arresting combination of classical portraiture and pinup art.

These works hark back to the days when portraiture was the domain of the aristocracy. Currin updates the tradition, eroticized and filled with art historical references. Whatever his position, nobody else does what he does, and the results are capable of reawakening one’s sense of wonder at what an artist is able to do by simply applying paint to canvas. Some dissenting voices might argue that such expertise in technique is wasted on frivolous subject matter, but there is no denying the power and originality of the work.

March 11, 2011
Mike Kelley at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

You have to be ready for almost anything when you enter a Mike Kelley show: a more or less conventional gallery view of objects or documents; a maze, matrix or mosaic of seemingly found or reconfigured objects; or an immersive multi-media experience of sculptural installations, with or without video or performance. Kelley’s show at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills — even more expansive than its double-compound title — was all of these things, and what felt like a post-mortem, too.

For those unfamiliar with the Superman mythology, Kandor was the home city of the child Superman and his parents, who the adult Superman rescued from the doomed planet Krypton and preserved in miniaturized form in a vacuum bottle infused with an artificial atmosphere fed and refreshed by a tank of compressed gases. The appeal of the motive (and its disparate comic-book renderings) to Kelley is obvious: its trauma or projected traumas and implicit “repressions,” nostalgia; the uncertainty and ambiguity of memory, its corruption or adulteration, and its reconstruction, reconfiguration or simply re-imagination; parallel to this, the corruption of empire and its residue; and many opportunities for thematic cross-fertilization within this mesh of cultural and psychological strands.

The first walk-through of almost any Mike Kelley show can feel a bit like a scavenger hunt. So it was at Gagosian, although visitors to the gallery were made immediately aware of the show’s immersive aspect as soon as they opened the gallery door to a pinball cacophony of sound and stepped into the dimly lit gallery. A small pile of rolled-up rugs pushed against the rear panel of one “room” of the main gallery was immediately followed by an archway through the panel revealing a shallow stage or platform painted in camouflage swirls executed in a fire-color palette, with a mannequin standing just beyond it. In the meantime, giggles and light screams pealed across the gallery spaces, overlaid with bells, chimes, hissing, rattling, and eerie echoes and reverberations. At least one source appeared to be the video projection a few feet away. A shimmer of iridescent silk drapery (also in a fiery palette) on a tall stand set off to an angle led the way to a pile of pillows and bolsters on which the viewer might recline to take in the video.

The video performance was familiar Kelley territory in Greek (or maybe Roman or Oriental) geek guise — a college seraglio. This was the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 — a pair of companion skits in neat reversal (“The King and Us” / “The Queens and Me”). In the first, a dark, modish lout in brown cloak and pink toga sulks and gnaws petulantly at a mutton leg (or something) while his entourage of harem ladies recline about in silk and satin sarongs, tunics and veils, coyly competing for the boy’s attention. The boy alternately spurns, ignores, or rewards their attentions and ignites their rivalries. In the companion skit, the boy — in the same costume, but clearly servile — enters with a flagon of wine or coffee to serve his “queens” and is himself ignored or teased and mocked. A second monitor and seating between the rear gallery and the new main gallery south facilitated viewing of the loopy skits. It’s something of an homage to Jack Smith — with the set’s bejeweled look and trays of pearls, beads and trinkets flung about; but Kelley doesn’t try to take it any further than his amateur cast can manage.

Before even arriving at the first and seemingly most important of the Kandor installations, it was impossible not to be distracted by the lifelike mannequin in front of the platform (which figured as a set in the videos) — to all appearances of Colonel Sanders, founder and eternal pitchman of the KFC chicken empire — inclined over a veiled lectern or pedestal, as if in readiness to pitch his latest chicken recipe. Less clear was what Kelley was “pitching” here. “Kandor 10A” was enshrined in a grotto of what looked like molded asphalt or volcanic residue (actually foam coated with Elastomer).

Here, on another mound of “asphalt,” a “city” of pale yellow opalescent crystal “towers” (tinted urethane resin) clustered beneath a large glass dome connected to a tall lavender compressed gas tank standing beside it — the whole reflected against a green metal “control panel” or prop cabinet. A pair of male under-briefs appeared discarded to one side, introducing a suggestion of masturbatory fantasy.

In the rear gallery, “Kandor” exploded into a vari-colored “City 04” — a still more oriental-looking mass of crystal elements (in resin) that from certain angles had the look of perfume bottles and cosmetic jars massed over a vanity table. A wooden stairway wrapped around the “asphalt” mound to a platform that offered a better view of the emerald, ruby, topaz, sapphire, etc. “City.” Pretty — and prettier still when viewed from the clerestory window en route to the upper level gallery.

There were other objects — kitsch, generic and bejeweled — both in this gallery and upstairs, all seated on their asphalt foam/Elastomer plinths; and many more iterations of the “Kandor” motive (or “Cities”) in variously colored resins — that did little to expand or elaborate its possible meanings. “Cat Head” looked like a found object — the sort of pail or container that might be used by a child for Halloween treats — but there were also generic Florence flasks on the same mound. Lab equipment for the clinical witch? Her dwarves — or gnomes — were obviously hard at some work in “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35” — a purple-tinted photographic lenticular representation of which hung here. In the new south main gallery, in the setting of their workshop, the “Dour Gnomes” could be viewed lumbering determinedly around a workbench – apparently forging their own demise as well as Kandor’s, which appeared ultimately to be vaporized in the video projection at the rear of the set. A snake of flattened plush remnants of their bodies, or at least their gray suits and pointed hats, coiled around cases of Corona beer in “Mexican Blind Cave Worm.”

The kitsch and Kandors upstairs were eclipsed by “Odalisque” — what appeared to be an asphalt- (foam-) covered mummy, the face hollowed out of its skull, with soot-drenched flowing hair resting on a divan or catafalque. A glass canister holding manacles or restraints was visible at the foot of the divan.

Which brings us back to Colonel Sanders (which was not even on the gallery’s checklist). His pedestal was actually a partially veiled Plexiglas box — containing yet another set and figure — miniaturized, but recognizably Sigmund Freud. That pairing raises questions about the uses of mythology — more specifically, mythologies of aspiration, their intersection with the algebra of need, and their susceptibility to distortion and manipulation. Col. Sanders’ product was greasy, crumb-laden chicken, the appeal of which is inevitably diminished in the wake of its potentially pathological sequelae. Without attempting to confine Kelley’s multi-valent mosaic to a singular interpretation, it was difficult to “escape” from the “Kandors” and their variously associated or dissociated “EAPRs” without sensing a similar pattern of ingestions and evacuations — and their ultimate pathology and futility.

February 21, 2011
GUEST LECTURE: Jim Shaw

Dream Object (Irregularly Shaped Canvas: John Jones, The Martian Manhunter elevating Ignorance chicken above cartoon, “The Liver is the Cock’s Comb,” with Ad Reinhardt clip art elements as magnetic fields; mustache), 2010

Dream Object (Irregularly Shaped Canvas: Superman in Blake scene from “Comus” illustration with Compact Vacuum Cleaner; decalcomania cave of blood diamonds; 7 deadly sins; 7 dwarfs), 2010

I was working on these shaped canvases and sculptures that had printed blowups of appliances and added elements such as Expressionist drips, shirtless guys in pain, cartoon and Fauvist chickens, and cartoon elements. One was like a reduced scale version of the bone sculpture with no top or exterior thin buttresses, and the biggest had Judd-like rectangular holes and a half cylinder on the back with drips coming from it. My LA dealer came in and said he wanted them all and I said, “No.” There were elements of Bacon and the shirtless men referenced the Netter CIBA-Geigy medical illustrations and probably Longo. The shapes seemed to refer to the object on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Presence. The Baileys had tried to get a group to buy their mansion, which was now on an island in the middle of the street in Danna Ruscha’s old neighborhood. Mike [Kelley] had also done a series of quick sketches for things like “repressed school memories game” and an issue of National Geographic with an article on Nazism in rock.
—Jim Shaw

Images Courtesy of Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Athens & Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica; Photo: LeeAnn Nickel,
Los Angeles

January 1, 2011