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  • A Ketchuppy Good Time

    A Ketchuppy Good Time

    I was urged electronically to go see Dutch theater company Wunderbaum on its last night in LA at the REDCAT with no details other than superlatives (which, however, managed to get a bunch of us on that contact list out). I knew it had something to do with LA artist Paul McCarthy’s work, and the troupe was pegged as “raw” and “political.” They had been developing the work as artists in residence for several weeks at the CalArts venue.

    The first two-thirds of the performance set up a reading of emails sent among cast members leading up to the evening’s performance, starting back home in Rotterdam. It seemed to be a legitimate avant-garde theater trope; an excruciating and honest look at the development of a theater piece becoming the drama. There were considerations of audience, collaboration, cultural translation, personal agendas and the illusive Big Idea. Included was the reluctant participation by a naive layperson — an attractive young bookstore owner representing the average, educated Dutch citizen — outraged by the publicly funded, arguably obscene McCarthy statue in a public square in Rotterdam. The offending work, unaffectionately nicknamed Santa Butt Plug, depicts a giant gnome holding a bell in one hand and a large sexual aid reminiscent of a Christmas tree in the other. The earnestness was amusing, and we felt let in on the joke with the “real actors,” and among people who like confrontational art. Angry citizen would come to LA to confront the artist right back.

    Paul all the time, photo Wunderbaum.
    Paul all the time, photo Wunderbaum.

    The email exchanges were so sniping and authentic that I dare say most of the audience was somehow merry to believe that these were actual transcripts. They wove the verisimilar with actual events, such as an L.A. Weekly theater critic Stephen Leigh Morris interview (the preview article for the play based on the interview assumed the topic of challenging Paul McCarthy was legitimate) and approaches to the artist himself. The troupe meanwhile was encountering an arts funding crisis in Los Angeles and the U.S. far more severe and intractable than the one they were in danger of losing perks from back home in a country that would support this type of somber self-indulgence. So when in the final act the whole cast (including, of course, the ingénue) exploded in an homage/parody of a Paul McCarthy-themed food and bodily fluids orgy, suddenly the whole absurd carnival was revealed hilariously. Obviously, now, the first part, with unwitting audience and media participation in the farce was a brilliantly choreographed and written play.

    In the lobby afterwards, when one of the troupe’s actors was having a drink next to me at the bar, I hesitated to ask about details of the set-up, wanting to remain in the not-quite-sure what the real story was. My response was similar to the exhilaration of another favorite spectacle this year, the Banksy film Exit Through the Gift Shop. The experience of being caught up in the play of levels of narration was somehow both classical and cutting edge. These two had the cathartic effect of challenging perceptions, having my seat unsteadied by the machinations of clever manipulators, while considering notions of the arts’ role in society, and having a bloody (ketchuppy) good time.

  • Burning Man of Love

    Burning Man of Love

    Though the annual festival known as Burning Man has received the occasional serious sniff from the art world, my overall anecdotal accounting of the festival rep in what one might call the high-end international art world has been one of mild disgust and pity. In general, art worlders like nothing better than to sneer at the post-hippie amateurs, as urbane Parisian aristocrats might sneer at their feudal country cousins right before both lost their heads. It’s easy to dismiss Burning Man (as opposed to documenta with its lower-case, self-serious Mittel-European pretensions or the Venice Biennale — which more often than not is a cavalcade of vaguely nationalistic bureaucratic cock-ups) as there’s no hierarchy of taste enforced, the works of art trotted out prefer experience over critical reflection and are largely uncommodifiable (exempting of course the costs of your ticket, transit, and survival, also payable in Kassel). Artistic participation in Burning Man looks bad on CVs and will hardly convince a trophy-hunting billionaire (or his Bard-educated advisor) to invest. The whole thing could, however, be considered by some lights to be a “kind of carnivalesque folk ritual” or at least some version thereof.

    Michael Smith went to Burning Man as Baby Ikki, one of the artist’s long-running performance persona (constituting an 18-month-old as played by Smith, now almost 60, wearing a knit bonnet and white Crocs).  Collaborator Mike Kelley stayed away. After the fact, Kelley and Smith edited the many hours of footage down to a movie that plays on six screens within the installation of their exhibition, called (mockingly? earnestly? both?) “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery.” This iteration took place at Kelley’s monumental studio in the Farley Building in Eagle Rock, following an inaugural showing last year at the Sculpture Center in New York.

    Production stills photographed by Malcolm Stuart. Courtesy of West of Rome Public Art, image courtesy of West of Rome Public Art, photography by Fredrik Nilsen
    Production stills photographed by
    Malcolm Stuart. Courtesy of West of Rome
    Public Art, image courtesy of West of Rome
    Public Art, photography by Fredrik Nilsen

    Though much of Kelley’s work draws from the psycho-spirituality of thrift store finds, the work in the installation looked all too easily cadged from the real Burning Man: a metal geodesic half-dome with stuffed animals (once a Kelley standby) sewn to its carpet, a jungle gym, a metal rocket with some plastic flags, a semi-abandoned VW van with a throne in the back made of more plush toys  (though this time much dirtier) and a mock Burning Man made of metal junk depicting a reaching Baby Ikki. Though the visual language seems wholly appropriated from the Mad Max dystopia/Utopia of Black Rock City, they also oddly reminded me of proper works (buyable from your local Gagosian outlet) by the significant international artist known as Mike Kelley, creating in my mind some kind of Venn diagram of high and low, a strategy oft employed by Kelley thoughout his career.

    Though Kelley purports to hate pop culture (and has said so in numerous texts), he still dissects it with the glee one can only have from loving your subject. Going back to this imaginary Venn diagram of the high and the low coming together in Kelley’s work, I can’t help but also jump to the conclusion, amidst the flashing strobe lights and dance music of the Kelley/Smith collaboration, that the contemporary art world is no better or worse than the disparaged psychedelic festivalism of Burning Man, which — like most artists (Kelley likely included) — is both loved and hated simultaneously.

    Most of the reviews (of both installations) have suggested that Smith and Kelley’s bringing Ikki to Burning Man is a way for the Mikes to satirize the safe hedonism of Black Rock City. The reviewers laugh along approvingly in a way that all seems very cynical and dismissive (from frieze to The New York Times, it’s read as Burning Man = Infantilism). Many of them project their own prejudices onto the affair of Baby Ikki: playing with matches and lighters while watching scenes from the 1973 film The Wicker Man and dreaming of pendulous breasts splashed suggestively with milk, wandering the desert with his cherished stuffed animal and overeating FireBalls, playing tetherball and getting grinded by volunteer strippers (most everyone but the federal police are volunteer at Burning Man) at Spike’s Vampire Bar.

    In one astute accounting of Baby Ikki, an anonymous writer at EAI called the overgrown tyke less a take on infantilism and more a blank canvas to project on. The founder of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, saw the Black Rock Desert where the festival is held as an “enormous blank canvas.” Perhaps there’s a problem in projecting our desires, failings and existential dreads on either a grown man dressed as a toddler or a paid festival in the desert.
    The convergence of these two observations does leave one wondering how these two blanknesses collide. Though Smith’s performance has something to do with infantilism, I pull back on the cynical read (though it may be echoed by Smith/Kelley) and put forward that Baby Ikki and Burning Man are both blank spaces upon which we can project whatever reading we want. So rather than a closed-down sardonic laugh-along, I’m going to let my own projection play out.

    Baby Ikki is like one of symbolist prankster Alfred Jarry’s characters dropped into an Antonioni film — parties and vacations only serving to hide the fact that Baby Ikki’s life is rather absurdly purposeless. Burning Man is symbolically a stand-in for a whole host of things, good and bad, ranging from the failure of progressive ideals to pop’s debasement of traditional values, leaving us to find spiritual succor where we can. The tension in the work isn’t the Smith-as-Ikki versus a world that unflinchingly accepts his infant-play, but rather a love-hate relationship with pop, sub-pop, marginal communities, Dada-istic nonsense, and folk art (or in other words, art made by nonprofessional artists).

    But Baby Ikki and Burning Man are whatever you make them, receptacles to pour whatever meaning you want into. Whatever they mean, their discomforting overlaps make their significance a little more slippery than most contemptuously facile readings would seem to allow.

  • Postconceptual GODFATHER

    Postconceptual GODFATHER

    “What’s with the God look?” I had thought to ask him at one point over the course of a rambling interview conducted in the lead-up to LACMA’s opening of his retrospective—provocatively, ironically titled, “Pure Beauty.” A slightly exaggerated (to say nothing of irreverent) take on a persona which is, after all, pretty familiar to most people who frequent Los Angeles art galleries, and indeed almost anyone acquainted with contemporary art around the world. But there is only so much time for irreverence in the company of an artist of John Baldessari’s stature.

    At 6 feet 7 inches, that might be half the story right there. Public perceptions of Baldessari’s persona or public image may have evolved more or less in step with his career, a kind of reinvention that might be expected to parallel the invention of a new kind of art: from artist-teacher-malcontent to the self-radicalized, self-reinvented artist-professor-mentor; the local artist with an aggressively global outlook; and finally an avuncular figure become anchor and authority for an agglomerate of disparate styles and movements now commanding the global art market.

    Baldessari’s own position in the global marketplace belies the extent of his influence; the auction records for his work do not approach the stratospheric levels of say, Koons, or for that matter, his conceptualist peer, Bruce Nauman. But even Baldessari’s “conceptualism” (if it can even be called that any longer) has always had a “left-coast” catholicity and eccentricity that set his work apart from his more ideologically entrenched peers (e.g., Kosuth)—a factor that has been crucial in the evolution of his art, as well as its broad influence. Ironically, as reluctant a teacher as he was, it is perhaps his role as mentor to a remarkably diverse group of artists that has extended and magnified his influence and importance. In other words, as important as his work is, it is not for that alone that he remains such an important figure in the post-modern contemporary landscape.

    His reticence to discuss his teaching or mentoring of this flock of students is initially off-putting. Yet over the course of an interview that veered wildly between shallows and depths, one began to sense that, just as the “voids” in his art can be as important as the visualized elements, what Baldessari doesn’t say is as important as what he does. Speaking of his early videos, many of which were made in conjunction with his earliest teaching at CalArts, he insists, “I didn’t teach; we didn’t have any formalized courses. I mean, it [the Sony Portapak video cameras] was there; so I was learning along with the students … Everybody was experimenting because there was nothing to learn. You were charting your own course.”

    JunctionSeriesWeb

    Yet even here, Baldessari limns a definition of a particular brand of conceptualism which, though it had already taken recognizable shape in some of the original text paintings, text-and-image pieces, early photography and the “Commissioned Painting” series executed between late 1967 and 1970, gave a wide berth to an extensive range of media, artistic or visual strategies, and expressive possibilities. Asked whether he could single out any of his students who made particularly original or inventive use of that license to learn, from classes that included, among others, David Salle, Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, James Welling and Matt Mullican, Baldessari insists he “can’t pick anyone out. I’d encourage any student to believe in themselves and not mirror other art that they see.” Baldessari speaks more expansively about his teaching/not teaching in Richard Hertz’s oral history, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia. “I don’t think you can teach art, but you can sure have a lot of good artists around.” But on a facing page, he takes a much more purposeful stance. “Good teaching is giving students a vision. I wanted to ignite a fire in their eyes.” Having once encouraged his students to leave LA for New York, Baldessari is unfazed that many of his former students moved in directions well beyond his own generous conceptualist and post-conceptualist ambit. “They wouldn’t be good artists if they didn’t.”

    In spite of the fact that he once said “If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn’t do art” Baldessari clearly admires a number of contemporary artists, including many well outside the post-conceptualist vein. But you wonder if the only place he’ll admit this is at a gallery or museum opening for one of them. Pressed to “name names,” he offers only the opinion that “Sigmar Polke in Germany is an incredibly inventive person.” Baldessari concedes, “There are a lot of artists I admire; I could go on and on.”

    Polke garners a second mention somewhat later in this interview, which underscores the sincerity of Baldessari’s admiration. For an artist of his exalted standing, he can be almost infuriatingly circumspect, even cagey, about his likes, dislikes, enthusiasms, inspirations and opinions. In discussing the matter of galleries and dealers (Baldessari has been blessed with outstanding representation on both coasts), the subject of New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch’s appointment to the directorship of MOCA is broached, and Baldessari stiffens a bit. “I probably shouldn’t say anything. I’m on the Board of Trustees — I’ll say that.” Pressed on grounds of increased transparency in MOCA’s administrative governance and executive oversight, he will admit only that “it was the decision of the Board to hire him, and I hope it all goes well. I mean that’s all you can say.” Which may say less about the incongruities and ambiguities between words so much a part of his working M.O., than the political softball of the LA art world.

    NoseEars

    Baldessari can be vague about his working means and methods (though he has occasionally been forthcoming in the past). It is true that his acquisitions of old movie stills and commercial photography have been relatively random or simply opportunely timed. He admits to having a special liking for film noir images, but quickly amplifies that he was never after movie stills, per se. “They were just collected as cheap visual imagery, which is something I’m interested in; and since I could get them so cheaply, if I found something interesting, I would buy it and think about it later.” But when asked about his methodology in selecting from his well-catalogued image bank and orchestrating the sequences, juxtapositions, and selective obliterations that are trademark components of his work, he volunteers nothing. “Intuition, I guess. How do you go about putting two words or sentences together? They either go together or they don’t.”

    On the other hand, addressing the signature voids and obliterations more specifically—the (sometimes colored) dots and voided elements or silhouettes—Baldessari seems aware that their appearance signals his authorship, and acknowledges that “it’s something that seems to be fundamental to a lot of what I do.”

    ArmsLegsWeb

    “I think viewers are pretty sophisticated. You don’t have to tell them everything. And I’m interested in hierarchies of looking at things. So if you had a very important-looking person—or not, just a person—I think we tend to look at a person’s face first, rather than their elbows, toes, or whatever. What I try to do is jostle that order and eliminate the most important things, and show the least important things; and I think that this jogs you into a new way of looking at things.”

    Baldessari’s rationale applies more convincingly to the reconfigured, arguably redirected, movie stills. Some of his most famous photo-collages from the mid-1970s and well into the 1980s feature both well-known and sometimes very expressive faces (e.g., Chicago’s most famous mayor, Richard J. Daley, in Brutus Killed Caesar), yet remain clearly subordinate to their controlling metaphors. Baldessari’s admiration for Godard to one side (he once called Godard a “more important visual artist than Jasper Johns”), he is no film director manqué. But he is conscious of “setting up a narrative.”

    As willfully disconnected from aesthetic considerations as Baldessari claims to be — and certainly some of his earliest conceptual work minimizes the aesthetic dimension (even as it asserts fine art status)—his work from the mid-1980s (and arguably earlier) has an aesthetic that seems to derive precisely from his interest in the “hierarchies of looking at things.” While he claims that even the use of color for his dots and voids was intended to be “non-aesthetic,” to function as “pure signal—red might be something dangerous, green might be something safe,” he accepts that “no matter what you do, it’s still going to look beautiful—you can’t escape it.”

    More recently Baldessari’s gestural dissections, reconnections and reconfigurations have given way to new fragmentations and dislocations (e.g., dislocated or displaced noses and ears). “It’s all about editing—what the person decides to put out or not put out there to the spectator or viewer. And there’s no sense visually in showing everything about a figure if all you want to do is talk about the presence of a figure. I mean, look at all of the movies you’ve seen now—you’re being very carefully manipulated. Artists do that, too.”

    For someone only casually acquainted with Baldessari’s career history, “connecting the dots” can be elusive. Just as Baldessari’s early text paintings and photo-emulsion canvases played—“didactically” or conceptually—on wrong or false teaching or misconceptions, Baldessari’s information-based art has seemed to evolve as much into an art of disinformation or even dysinformation. (Consider, for that matter, his titles—e.g., Pathetic Fallacy; Blasted Allegories, Virtues and Vices.) Baldessari might call it an art of “disruption.” More than once during the interview — as he does by way of explaining his “reversals” (of noses, ears, etc.)—he reiterates, “it’s to disrupt your expectations, to get you to look.” And, presumably, to look back and around.

    GodNose

    Perhaps it was to be expected that Baldessari and his collaborators would look back for this retrospective, one of his largest to date, but their choice of title amounts not merely to a throw-back, but something of a throw-down. Pure Beauty is the title (and text-image) of a 1968 text painting, which “reads” a bit like Baldessari’s text-painting equivalent to Yves Klein’s empty art gallery—pure (or, in reversal, not at all), entirely abstract, meaningful and meaningless at the same time. “The curator who did the show at the Tate [Jessica Morgan] and I both decided it would be a great title because in the last 10 years or so, the idea of beauty in art has been something that people are talking and writing about; and [we] decided that would be an appropriate title. I’m not positing anything about what beautiful should be.” Nor did Dave Hickey, who has mostly written about what beautiful “does,” though his embrace of the aesthetic is pretty full-blooded. Hickey is often credited as the critic who instigated the most recent round of critical discourse on the issue of beauty and art — though it should be noted that he has also written about Baldessari, in flattering terms.)

    Yet, in the same interview, discussing his earliest text and text-and-image conceptual work, Baldessari sums up the kernel of his idea as “just [having] something like that—to read. It’s not supposed to be beautiful; it’s just information. And my idea was why can’t that be art also?”

    It goes without saying that apprehending (and responding to) beauty amounts to a kind of information processing. Baldessari is clearly intent upon upending expectations of “beauty” (or its conventional notions), in tweaking, challenging, or even reversing our apprehension—but he is somewhat disingenuous about the formal means he uses to do so. The irony is that there is great formal beauty to be found in much of Baldessari’s work. Regardless of its relative beauty (or rejection of the aesthetic—a matter of taste, in any case), his work as it has evolved over the years has seemed to acquire greater elegance.

    It is certainly no less ambitious—as recent shows, including two in Los Angeles at the Margo Leavin Gallery—abundantly evidence. The version of Blue Line (Holbein) he showed recently at Margo Leavin actually drew together installation projects (and art historical references) executed for three different museums, eliciting a diachronic/synchronic tension familiar from much of his earlier work. “The other thing is that if one is an artist, each time one does a work of art, you get more and more acutely aware of your idea of what is beautiful.” Baldessari mused, “So I don’t think one really has to work at it much because you can’t defeat yourself; it’s going to come out anyway. So you have to sort of work against yourself being beautiful because it’ll come out anyway—why work at it?”

  • My Lunch with Zak Smith

    My Lunch with Zak Smith

    This interview took place December, 2009, at the restaurant in Los Feliz at Fred 62. Zak ordered the spaghetti.
    Find this article in our Jan/Feb 2010 issue; Artillery’s first Biennial Sex Issue…(time for another!) https://artillerymag.com/product/janfeb-2010/

     

    ARTILLERY: Do you believe in God?
    ZAK SMITH: No. (Pauses, then smirks). Okay, you can’t scientifically disprove it, so maybe there’s a God. But if there is, he’s definitely a jerk. So it’s either I don’t believe in him, or if it turns out he’s real, I have a bone to pick.

    When did you lose your virginity?
    Fourteen.

    Do you consider your involvement in porn an extension of your art?
    Not at all. Sometimes I make pictures that are about the porn business, the way Cézanne made pictures about apples. But the apples weren’t his art. His art was painting. I’ve answered that question so much, that I’m convinced no one ever reads these interviews.

    Do you consider yourself lucky? Because a lot of men would envy your position.
    Yeah, I’m lucky. I feel it’s important to point out that I’m lucky because I wouldn’t want people to think I’m one of those artists who thinks they’re successful because the art world rewards quality. Because it doesn’t. I make good work, but the fact that I happen to be successful is just per chance, because they’re unrelated things.

    What’s more important to you, sex or art?
    Sex.

    Zak Smith, detail drawing from Drawings Made Around The Time I Became A Porn Star (2008)

    But what if you were stranded on an island, and you could either have all the sex you wanted, but could never make art. Or you could make art all day, but never have sex?
    Depends on the person on the island.

    What’s the ultimate compliment to you? Is it when someone is praising your art, your writing, or your fucking?
    I think compliments are kinda cheap. If you do anything in public, you’re going to get compliments, and you’re going to get insults. A real compliment isn’t what is said, it’s who says it. So, if it’s someone whose art you really appreciate, and they like your art, then that’s a meaningful thing. If there’s someone you really want to have sex with, and they want to have sex with you, then that’s a compliment, I guess.

    Whose art do you like?
    Historically? I like Bernini a lot. I like a lot of ’60s photographers — William Eggleston, Robert Frank. People working today? I like Philip Ross, Nick DiGenova. I don’t really like a lot of traditional mainline oil painting — like I think Velàzquez was good at oil painting and Vermeer was, but other than that, it’s kind of a useless medium, like colored mud.

    When did you become involved in the porn industry, and did you just do it for kicks? Were you a horny guy who just wanted to get laid?
    2006. Uh, all of those are the same options, as far as I can tell, right? I mean, yeah. This director had seen the “Gravity’s Rainbow” drawings I did and said, ‘It’d mean a lot if I could use your art in my movie, but it’s a porno movie, blah, blah, blah.’ And I said, ‘Sure, you can use it, and it would mean a lot to me if I could have sex with all the girls in the movie.’

    I was describing you to a friend, as a modern-day Toulouse-Lautrec. Do you agree?
    I guess if you wanted to draw a broad historical equivalent, sure.

    Is acting in porn just a side gig? A vocation? A hobby?
    I get paid, so it’s not a hobby. It’s a very occasional job. I get to be choosy, because I have a whole other job.

    Do you work on your art every day?
    Yes. If I’m awake, I’m working. Unless I’m doing this [eating].

  • Sergio Messina

    Sergio Messina

    IT’S true of the digital times that libido drives technology, but according to my friend Sergio Messina, porn is not only the engine of the Internet but the bona fide locus of art. And he’s on a mission to prove it: “At the very least it’s the perfect metaphor for the potential of digital media and a new paradigm of content production, a great example of how the world should be,” he says, with the same ardor I can remember him expressing about the latest Frank Zappa bootleg tape back in high school. We are zooming now through a dusty hinterland of Joshua trees and desert flophouses on an impromptu trip through the Mojave after the semester he spent at Chicago’s Art Institute as visiting artist teaching a course titled For Real: an exploration of today’s fetish for reality, in porn and elsewhere, but his fervor is unchanged from back in Rome, when we’d listen to Hendrix and Henry Cow and muse on culture and politics (and the politics of culture) in that emphatic art school manner.
    Ten years later Sergio was playing guitar with various bands and Dj-ing at indie radio stations, blasting Italian airwaves with P Funk. He produced hip hop bands from Naples, bounced around the vibrant youth counterculture scene of the Centri Sociali in Milan and Turin, all the while pushing the musical envelope. In the late ’90s he was recording soccer hooligan chants during matches at Milan stadium and remixing it to drum & bass into aural happenings, expanding his progressively more conceptual horizons in live performances on Austria’s ORF public radio. As performer and teacher at Milan’s Istituto Europeo di Design, Sergio was a compulsive early adapter, always in some ways about the intersection of technology and self-expression, and the Internet was a natural extension of it. As an early resident on Second Life he made a name for himself as a virtual tattoo peddler and advocate for the anti-copyright cause. But what most attracted his attention in the proto-Web of the mid-’90s were usergroups, early precursors of social networks where participants shared their common interests. Those under the heading of alt.sex especially caught his interest.

    “The real early stuff was Danish and British sex pictures scanned and uploaded,” Sergio says. “But the remarkable thing happened when digital pictures started — now there was no photographer involved, no real intermediary. People started producing and posting different images, stuff that seemed worthy of a closer look.” Sergio calls this massive blooming of self-produced erotica the “digital porno revolution,” a movement of uninhibited mass self-expression. He began collecting materials, mainly self-portraits uploaded to sites devoted to what you might call extremely niche fetishes, and undertook a semiotic deconstruction of the images that evolved into “The Talk,” a slide presentation/guided tour of handmade Web smut, part-academic lecture, part performance in the mold of Joseph Beuys, which he has since performed at museums, conferences and galleries worldwide.

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    When I walked in on “The Talk” at the Armory show last year in New York, the screen was flashing a picture of the “sneaker-fucker,” in which a naked man is having his way with a fastidiously laced basketball high-top. In this image, like in others, Messina is interested in critical context, in location and background. There’s the dominatrix self-portrait in full regalia, about which he notes mainly the suburban living room setting, the dining room set, the Christmas family portraits on the mantle and the complete works of L. Ron Hubbard visible on the bookshelf in the corner. In other words, the startling juxtapositions of the transgressive and the mundane that elevate the pictures from the prosaic realm of porn to legitimate, if sometimes unintentional, art. Sergio sees in these works of self-effacing narcissism elements that connect them to the snapshot aesthetics of Nan Goldin and Terry Richardson. And since, as Beuys declared, “Everybody is an artist,” these works of compulsively broadcast libido are artistic in a supremely democratic way. “They are political acts,” he says, “pictures that create and ‘own’ an aesthetic and therefore have a ‘temperature’ that no glossy porn spread from the Valley can ever have. These people look like us and we live surrounded by images, on TV, on billboards, that most definitely do not resemble the way we look. By reclaiming the right to be porn stars, realcorers subvert the established aesthetic conventions,” the purvey, in other words, of art.

    Sergio begins each talk with a disclaimer: “I’m not a sociologist, I’m not an anthropologist, I’m not an expert on sexual behavior. I’m a musician.” Which may be true, but he’s very obviously a born performer. He has been described by writer Mark Dery as the “Margaret Mead of Internet porn,” and “The Talk” is very much a stand-up routine starring hiccup aficionados, elbow enthusiasts, corduroy fetishists and parking lot flashmob orgies. A guided tour of modern psycopathia sexualis manifested in online pictures. “The idea is to give people a tour of places they wouldn’t otherwise know about,” he says of his compilations of “Kodak moments of porn” — and to do it with a smile.

    “Look at this guy with the neatly parted hair,” he says of the slide in which an athletic man stares into the camera as he hangs from his testicles. “It’s an absolutely amazing image. He totally looks like a Republican, but he’s obviously also a radical, and to me, that creates an optimistic short circuit. The idea is to talk about it in a funny way. Sure, the show is funny, but never in a destructive way.” Messina then asks, “Is it art? Well, I think art should always project a measure of urgency and danger, and these pictures have it. In spades”

    From the vantage point of the present landscape, with its American Apparel ads and cell-phone reality shows, Sergio’s talk is also some sort of historical anthropology of amateur smut. “These people did this stuff 10 years before everybody else and it explains the current flourish of tweens flashing tits on Facebook. It confirms that self-produced dirty pictures are the contemporary transgression of choice. Realcore is similar to early rock ‘n’ roll in that way, like Frank Zappa used to say: ‘For all you beautiful people out there, there are a lot more of us ugly motherfuckers!’” ■

  • Mike Kelley and Michael Smith

    Mike Kelley and Michael Smith

    Mike Kelley and Michael Smith are iconoclasts who for years have challenged accepted conventions, creating artworks that provoke and titillate. Although friends since 1975, they have never collaborated before. “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery,” their first work together, is significant in this regard. Here each man has brought his own sensibilities — the signature stuffed animals for Kelley; Baby Ikki for Smith — and in collaboration have fashioned an environment where documentation of Baby Ikki at an arts festival (Burning Man) is surrounded by sculptures, lights and artifacts that transport viewers both physically and spiritually to the event’s local.

    The installation moves from outside to inside. Viewers are first greeted by a row of portable toilets and Baby Ikkii’s dilapitated VW van, the interior of which contains a chair-like sculpture created by assembling numerous stuffed toys. As the viewer moves into the gallery space they cross the threshold from day to night and are immediately confronted by pulsating lights and a room filled with music.

    In the darkened space six video projections recant Baby Ikki’s journey to and during the festival, culled from hours of footage and edited into a six part narrative. Smith attended Burning Man as Baby Ikki, staying in character and filming his performance at the four-day event. Watching the videos in fragments reflects the event where many things happen simultaneously and where what is thought of as the ultimate group experience can also become quite isolating. Each screen is hung in or near its own individually spotlit structure, separating the journey into discrete segments.

    The environment adds vitality to the piece that both celebrates and critiques the festival. Using sections of metal tubing the artists have assembled open tents and domes that resemble Buckminster Fuller’s architecture. These empty structures house the screens upon which Smith’s videos are projected and suggest what remains when the crowds have gone. In one the floor is littered with a rug of stuffed animals — a recognizable Kelley trademark. Wandering through this environment one is thrust into confronting the pros and cons as to whether this is an adult or child’s world. The centerpiece of the installation, like the centerpiece at Burning Man, is a larger-than-life size junk sculpture that towers above the installation. Both docile and threatening this man/child is Baby Ikki, still intact, as the sculpture has not been burned. The sculpture is an amazing tower of discarded objects that speaks of what is sacred and what is waste in today’s society.

    “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery” is just that. It charts the voyage of an invented character at a real festival that is the ultimate fantasy world. Rather than recreate the environment that reflects the hot desert days, Kelley and Smith have created the chill of the night, when all that remains is the memory.

  • All Her Children

    All Her Children

    It was two years ago when I first saw Susan Anderson’s photographs at an art fair in New York. They were images of little girls all dolled up, seemingly for one of those kiddie beauty pageants. I was struck by the pictures for several reasons: The photographs displayed composition, skillful technique, over-the-top glamour and saturated color; the little-girl beauty pageants are fascinating for the sheer spectacle; and the models had an aloofness that invited more lingering.

    Back then, Anderson was in the midst of attending and documenting “High Glitz” beauty pageants, a category specifically for little girls who go all out with the sequins, big hair, makeup and flippers (fake veneers for teeth) — the works. She was planning a book and a gallery exhibition of the photos. Those were her goals then. Now, two years later and with four pageants under her belt, her book, High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty Pageants, is coming out in October. She already had a solo show with Torch Gallery in Amsterdam last winter and will show with Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles this fall.

    Curiously enough, I met Anderson on the flight back to LA after I’d first seen her work in New York. Suddenly she was everywhere; I frequently bumped into her at art functions in LA. Each time I would ask about her project. Each time she appeared to be making considerable progress. Each time I asked her if it was time for us to sit down for an interview. You could see that it was happening for her. The last time I saw her at an opening, she was passing out an art announcement from her show in Amsterdam. The cover shot was mesmerizing and caught everyone’s eye. It was time for that interview.

    Anderson greets me while talking on her cell, rolling her eyes, signaling to me just a few more minutes. With her cropped, mussy brunette locks and comely bespectacled looks, Anderson has an air of professionalism rarely associated with artists. She’s tall and slender, poised and charming, and glides up the creaky wooden staircase in her Koreatown studio talking on the cell phone the entire time, with me following behind. Somehow she manages to make me feel comfortable while gracefully trying to end her phone conversation. This introduction to Anderson seemed to characterize her for me. I admired her many talents and her ability to juggle them all at the same time.

    Her shared studio was neat and orderly, with lots of images pinned on the wall — not one of them crooked! Her latest project, the beauty pageant children, was represented in various forms: small test photos, large prints, layouts for the book, images of tiaras, white Mary Janes and trophies. Everything on the wall was pink and blue. I was able to feast my eyes on a work in progress, including Anderson on the phone — herself a work in progress. Right now, her life is one meeting after another; she’s featured in a lot of European publications and she sold some pieces to a museum in Amsterdam.

    “The Dutch are just going crazy for it,” she said dismissively, waving her hands. She showed me a poster that just arrived: “Achtung Baby!” It announced her Dutch exhibit with her photograph, Danica, as the literal “poster child.”

    Initially it was Anderson’s photographs, her images, that drew me into her work. But moments later, after settling my eyes on the portraits, I also knew I wanted to know more about the artist herself — the person who chose to go around and take these photos. The person who found this subject matter worth documenting.

    Anderson was raised in Minneapolis and received her BFA from the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She stayed in Chicago and went immediately into TV, mainly as a production designer on high-end commercials. She came to LA in 2001 and began a career in fashion photography. One can see the high technical standards and skill she acquired working in the industry. She takes her craft very seriously, and brings that expertise to her fine art photography.

    But something Anderson always did on the side was document live performances and publicity shots for local bands. One gig she got, with the Los Angeles burlesque troupe Velvet Hammer, was at the Mayan theater downtown. She set up her camera and lights in a room where the performers could stop in and get their photos taken on their way to and from the stage. She got some terrific shots, and Anderson liked the “ready-to-go” portraits that came out of that experience. That method eventually led to her beauty pageant photos.

    Steeped in the commercial world of superficiality and blonde ambition, Anderson tells the story of how one day while working with a beautiful model on a shoot, she mused, “Do I like doing this? Maybe I need to do a project that somehow lets me think about what I’m doing. Or think about images of women who are going out there who have to deal with this ideal of beauty, or whatever that is. This preconceived idea that we’re all aspiring to or being told we need to achieve.”

    Then one evening, still in her introspective mode, she was watching a documentary on the history of beauty pageants and thought, Beauty pageants, that’s kind of an interesting subject. She’d been reading a lot of books about beauty, something that has always intrigued her.

    “So, I went online and I Googled ‘beauty pageant’ and this title came up, it was one of the top hits. It was ‘Universal Royalty Beauty Pageants.’ I just clicked on it and I started reading this thing. It was all blinking and there were photographs of these little girls with makeup and I was like, Oh my God. So I started writing the director this e-mail, ‘Dear Annette, I’m a fashion/beauty photographer in Los Angeles,’” she told me, air-typing as she continued. “And, I’m thinking to myself, Wow, I won’t have to do any retouches because these girls would be so young and their skin would be perfect! So, I immediately got the visual for what the exhibition would be like. I thought, What if I went to this thing and lit these girls like I would light the best beauty photograph I could ever light and show that in an art exhibit. And I saw it immediately! It was like, ‘Bing!’”

    Susan Anderson, Mary Ashton (2009)
    Susan Anderson, Mary Ashton (2009)

    Here’s where Anderson’s aforementioned ready-made portraits come in. “I thought, what if I went to one place and I could get a bunch of people at once already in hair and makeup — it was a dream! And, just from purely technical standpoints, since I do a lot of retouching on fashion and beauty things

    — I was doing so much skin retouching — I thought, I won’t even have to retouch the photographs!”

    Anderson’s commercial art background seems to foster such pragmatic thinking. She continues, “So, on some level, it was economical. I could get a bunch of material at one full swoop, not even completely understanding what I was getting myself into.

    “The director e-mailed back and said, ‘Sure! Why don’t you come to our state pageant in August?’ — which was in Austin, Texas. So, I was working on this job, making a bunch of money, and I had one of my assistants with me and I looked at her and said, ‘We’re going to Texas! I just bought us two tickets!’”

    That was the first pageant she went to in 2005, and it was held at the Double Tree Inn. “I said I’m a fine art photographer, I’m a beauty and fashion photographer. I want to do an exhibition and a book. I told everyone that from the very beginning.” Her professional background benefits her on every level, it seems. Each model signed a photo release and everything was on the up and up. But there are always some skeptics lurking about: with a subject matter so loaded, especially after the TLC reality show Toddlers and Tiaras and the JonBenét tragedy highlighting every child beauty pageant. Anderson writes in an essay included in her book how she felt it necessary to explain her process. She wanted to make sure viewers knew these photos were not staged. That’s important to know, actually. “It’s a very different story if I go to the pageant, set up a studio and photograph the girls as they are at that moment, rather than if I were to bring them to a studio and make them look that way.”

    Anderson knows exactly what she’s doing on so many levels. I wondered what it is about these photos, and why so many people are attracted to them. She explains, “This is sort of my theory about it. I’ve been a photographer for a long time, and I’m someone who looks at images all the time. I love photography, I love painting. I think we have this collective, sort of unconscious history of the world of art in our heads that we’re not aware of all the time. I think sometimes when I take the pictures, that later on I’m like, Oh, that reminds me of this. That’s the Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol, only she’s 4. There’s something that’s communicated, something that rings familiar, and I can’t tell what it is. And I think that’s how these pictures work.

    “There’s some kind of tie to our visual history of celebrity, glamour, beauty, portraiture. There’s that in there too. I think there’s also that double take. Like people look, then see that’s she’s 4. There’s this shock-and-awe kinda thing. There’s something not quite right. Maybe it’s the teeth are too big, she looks older than she really is. There’s this whole illusion of an older person on this small body. Also, they’re just really beautiful. They’re dimensional, they’re colorful, they’re saturated, they’re sparkly. I think they’re attractive, but then there’s this push and pull thing that happens.”

    But what about the stigma attached to child beauty pageants? Is it exploitive, and does Anderson contribute to that? Anderson includes in her book essays by nY Observer columnist Simon Doonan and The new York Times best-selling author Robert Greene, who preempt any questions headed in that direction. The two articles are excellent, Doonan’s being hilariously campy, and Greene’s on the serious side.

    But I wanted to hear what Anderson had to say about the oppressive nature of the pageants. Without missing a beat, she dismissed the idea, explaining how she’s used to people looking like something they’re not. “I’m fascinated by the transformational quality of cosmetics, and the illusion involved with photography. You know, you look at a photograph of a movie star and you know how much work has been done to that picture. It’s not the way that person looks in real life.”

    Anderson’s reply was convincing. After all, the pageants are voluntary events — at least for the stage mothers. Besides, she added reflectively, “It’s really not about children, what I’m doing. They happen to be the

    andeRson PhoToGRaPhed by TyleR hubby

    This page, clockwise from top-left: Kaylie, age 3, Austin, Texas (2005); Jacklyn, age 7, Las Vegas, Nevada (2006); susan anderson in her studio; Katy (profile), age 5, Las Vegas, Nevada (2006); Mary Ashton, age 9, Nashville, Tennessee (2008); all anderson images: © susan anderson Photography / Courtesy of Kopeikin Gallery

    subject. The thing that fascinates me about the High Glitz aesthetic as long as I’ve been working on this project: I don’t really understand it. I don’t understand where it comes from. When I went to Nashville, it made the most sense to me.”

    Anderson had never been to the South, and there everything began to crystallize for her. She told the story about the emcee, Mr. Tim Whitmer. “He’s like THE guy. He’s the Bert Parks of little-girl pageants. When I heard him say, ‘Welcome to Nash Vegas,’ all of a sudden, High Glitz just made sense to me. You think Dolly Parton, you think the big hair, those country-western costumes with all the rhinestones encrusted. Maybe it is really about this showtime, the ruffled skirts. Everything gets out of control to a point. It’s very American. Everything is bigger, sparklier, more is better.”

    Back to the subject of beauty, though. I keep thinking of the saying, “Truth is beauty,” but these pageants seem exactly the opposite, like it’s all fake. I put this to Anderson, and she replies, “Well, it is all fake, but there’s something REAL about it. There are some girls that I’ve photographed that are beautiful.” But youth can be beauty, I point out, especially with regard to her photos. “Well, that’s what our society tells us. We’re completely youth-obsessed,” she admits.

    But Anderson also notes that as much makeup and glitter as these little girls have on, their personalities still come through. She became close to the subject in a lot ways. She told me she can remember the moment she took the photographs of each of her subjects. “I knew when I had a great shot. I thought, Oh my God, this is amazing. There’s something happening right now, I don’t know what this is … but, CLICK!”

    I notice two books on her desk, The Symptom of Beauty, by Francette Pacteau, and History of Beauty, by Umberto Eco and Alastair McEwen, and ask about them. “Beauty is something that changes over time.

    It’s always evolving. It’s not a constant. And really young girls who know at a very young age that they want to be up on stage and performing, I think that’s fascinating.

    “I’m fascinated by people who want to be up in front of people on stage and perform. I know how to light and make women beautiful. Women are a subject for me, and something I’m always interested in photographing. In fact, I’m sure the next project I do will also be about beauty and women in some way.”

    But what makes this art and not fashion photography or photos in a costume catalog? Anderson’s answer is evasive and savvy at the same time. “Well, that’s not for me to answer: I leave that to you people who write about art,” she laughs heartily. “I just started the project, and people responded to it.”

    Did Susan Anderson just define the age-old question, “What is Art?”

  • Data and Surrealism

    Data and Surrealism

    Tracking down George Legrady for an interview can be tricky. A man who juggles art and science for a living has a lot of demands on his time. Hence, I found myself at a panel discussion on Database Aesthetics at the convention center in Los Angeles early one Saturday morning. The room was packed and I had to sit on the floor. Legrady was one of the panelists whose area of expertise is Data Visualization. I’m not going to pretend I know half of what the panel was talking about, so here’s the “Data Technology for Dummies” version.

    George Legrady in Costa Rica
    George Legrady in Costa Rica

    I first met Legrady when I was a grad student at USC in 1986. He taught photography and was one of those professors who would hang out with the grad students and come to our openings and drink beers. Legrady was never into conventional photography; he was more interested in his soundboards and computers and signals from the music he played. Since he was so brainy, he came off like an absent-minded professor type, only hip, handsome and European-chic (he’s originally from Budapest, then lived in Montreal). At that time, Legrady was easily riding the crest of digital art and technology, and modestly points out he was “one of the early artists who worked with multilinear digital narrative.” Who am I to argue?

    Before USC, Legrady taught at UC San Diego, where he met Harold Cohen, a first-generation computer artist in the early ’70s. Cohen developed AARON, a digital program that painted abstract paintings much like his own. Legrady feels indebted to him: “I met him at a party, and he gave me a key to his studio, and I was in there for four years and learned everything.” This is when Legrady discovered computer programming, never to return from cyberspace.

    Kinetic Flow
    Kinetic Flow

    Legrady describes his art as Data Visualization and claims he has been collecting information forever, even with his photography in college when he was working with conceptual issues. “It’s always been data. I might look at how business handles data. I might look at how NASA handles data. How people in shops handle data,” Legrady explains. “I begin with real data. I’m always playing between what is real and what are ways to represent something.” Could Legrady be a Dataist?

    A perfect example of how Legrady works with data is an interactive installation currently on view at Rem Koolhaas’ Public Library in Seattle. Legrady installed it in 2005 and it will be in operation until 2014. Quite simply, every time someone checks out a book, it analyzes the data. Legrady explains, “What I try to show is what the community is thinking. It’s more interesting to look at what we don’t see.” He also points out proudly, “The librarians love it.” They can look up at the screens and see which books are the most popular at any given moment. An information exchange extravaganza!

    Legrady is currently a professor in the department of Media Arts & Technology (MAT) at UC Santa Barbara. MAT is very unique in the UC system as it is a true arts-engineering interdisciplinary graduate/PhD program. The faculty consists of computer scientists, electrical engineers and electronic composers. The media arts area includes Legrady (data visualization), Marcos Novak (architect), Marko Peljhan (activist media arts) and Lisa Jevbratt (data visualization and interspecies communication). In addition to his teaching career, Legrady is constantly flying all over the world to serve on panels and lectures, not to mention working on his several ongoing art projects.

    My burning question to Legrady is why are artists who are so interested in science not scientists? Legrady indulges me: “There’s a lot of interest today — it’s kind of trendy — to have artists and science work together, but the scientists say it’s not science, and the artists say it’s not art. So, what is it? It’s kind of like a meeting point where artists are looking at science as a source of inspiration for material. Scientists are explorers of the universe; artists are people who reflect on how these scientific things have an impact. So, it’s an interesting conversation, and everyone hopes that it will lead to a new kind of hybrid, like an interdisciplinary artist scientist, or artist engineer. It’s really challenging, because you need to have the knowledge base of both, and that’s a lot of knowledge.”

    I’m still skeptical. I can see why artists might be attracted to science, but I don’t see why scientists would care much for having artists involved in their activities. Are artists just using science to validate their projects? “I’m not so sure,” Legrady says. He observes that a lot of his colleagues are activists. “They are interested in environment, they are interested in biology, how research in animals takes place, so there’s a kind of political activism to it.”

    Legrady goes on to squelch my cynicism. “Let’s say you want to discover how many bubbles you have in your bathtub or bubble bath — there’s a scientific method that’s been developed. That’s what scientists do. And when they look at art, they can’t figure out how to evaluate it, so it’s outside of their world. Like beauty, how do you evaluate what is beautiful? So, artists work with beauty, or not.

    “Scientists want to discover the phenomena of life, of the world — that’s what scientists do. Engineers make things work. Artists are in this open zone. We can explore the aesthetics and the poetics of something. They can use stuff to create political activism, political change.”
    Or figure out how many bubbles are in the bubble bath.

    George Legrady is represented by Edward Cella Art + Architecture in Los Angeles. He is currently featured at the Plug-In alternative gallery in Basel, Switzerland, until the end of May and will have a solo retrospective at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany, next year.

    This article was originally published in May, 2009.

  • Extremity in the First Degree

    Extremity in the First Degree

    Waters once said, “To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.” And after seeing his place in San Francisco, I would have to say he practices what he preaches. Antique furniture, tapestries and decorative drapery adorn the small but elegant 1920s apartment in Nob Hill. Bookshelves line the walls. Very tasteful art (okay, some not so tasteful) hangs on the walls and fills every nook and cranny. He has to stash the bag of rocks by Paul Lee when the maid comes, so she won’t mistake it for rubble. And he has to hide his Richard Baker pill art when his ex-junkie friends visit.

    But I’m not here to check out Waters’ pad, nor his art collection — I’m here to talk about his art, and his two solo shows with Gagosian in Los Angeles and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, both happening in April. “Rear Projection” is the title and on the announcement card is a pair of buttocks with a film projected on them. Get it? Waters explained that it’s a term for the fake moving scenes behind actors on film sets, mainly when the characters are driving. He’s always loved them, and of course, there’s the pun. That John!

    Waters in his San Francisco apartment. Photo by Tyler Hubby.
    Waters in his San Francisco apartment. Photo by Tyler Hubby.

    Known first as an underground filmmaker in the ’70s, Waters has been making and showing art since the ’90s. And now, he’s with the most famous and powerful art dealer in the world — Larry Gagosian. This will be his first show with Gagosian, and he’s been with Marianne Boesky for three years. Waters says, “People were incredibly suspicious when I had my first art show.” A lot of people, mainly artists, are dubious of celebrities who suddenly come out and say: Oh, you didn’t know I paint too? Waters wanted to make sure I knew that his status in the film world did not pave the road for easy access into the art world and that he keeps both worlds very separate. 

    It was Colin de Land, from American Fine Art gallery, who gave Waters his first show back in 1992. De Land approached Waters and asked him if he made art. It just so happened the filmmaker had an entire body of artwork at the time. He had been photographing film scenes from movies, then pasting them together out of context. 

    “I could never really have gone as far as I have without Colin de Land,” Waters says with heartfelt gratitude. “But because it was at American Fine Art, probably THE most respected cutting-edge gallery — and most of the time there was nothing for sale — it kind of protected me as much as it could from that. So I owe Colin a great, great part of my entrée into the art world.” 

    A black vinyl binder sits prominently on the dinner table that takes up the entire dining room. We sit around it. He opens it up and it’s full of reproductions of his recent work. The images are in clear plastic folders that he flips through excitedly. He skips from image to image, then topic to topic and we find ourselves talking about the Mansons or the religious cult the Process — also the title of one of his pieces. Waters has been to their chapel in New Orleans and speaks wildly about them, as if possessed: “The Process [is a cult] others have said the Mansons copied. They worship Christ and the Devil. If there ever was a cult I would have joined, it would have been the Process.” I watch Waters with amazement, how he truly gets excited about such things, and then when I’m just about to sign on the dotted line, he pauses, gets serious, and shyly admits the real reason he’s into them: “They wore cloaks.”

    His famous Cheshire cat grin appeared. I was waiting for it. It’s that mystery about Waters that keeps most of his fans going. Is he for real? Is it all a joke? One thing’s for sure: When you’re having a solo show with Larry Gagosian, it’s no joke.

    WATERS-2009-Hollywood-Smile-Train

    Both shows will be crammed with photograph collages and sculptures too. We stop at an image of a giant night cream jar — a product Waters uses that costs $200. Waters calculated that it would cost more than $800,000 if the cream were to fill the sculpture. (He didn’t make it clear if that was the price of the piece.) All the sculptures are influenced by Pop art, and are, frankly, hilarious. There’s an oversized roach motel and a huge poppers jar, “I’m a fan of poppers, I always have been,” Waters quips. 

    So where does Waters find the time to do all this? “It’s not like Ghost, where I’m at a pottery wheel,” he pointed out. Waters has a staff working for him. It’s no more than a handful of people, but it’s a staff nonetheless. And he is rigid with his schedules. He has organized his time to set aside days for each of his many media. He’s currently working on a book, so one day might be his writing day. He has “art days” when he goes into the studio and works all day on just art. “Rear Projection” has been in the works for two years. He starts every day the same, Monday through Friday. Gets up at 6 a.m., reads his newspapers, drinks tea. He works on his projects from 8 a.m. until noon. Then from noon until the end of the day, he deals with the business end of things.

    WATERS-2009-Children-Who-Smoke

    One of his art days might consist of a day in the studio with his remote, stopping and starting the beginning of a blood-curdling scream of a blonde in a ’50s Oldsmobile convertible, with her stilettos pressed against the brakes, heading for a crash. One such piece, titled Look Out!, consists of movie scenes where the damsel in distress is the focus. By zeroing in on that horrific moment, Waters manages to make the viewer laugh, to make that scene suddenly camp (even though a lot of the films he picks border on camp) — and something he apparently has down. He uses a 35mm film camera to shoot the movie scene from video, then has it developed; he prefers low-tech. Waters notes his process is “about editing, and film knowledge, and hopefully, it’s about humor. Which is what all my work is about, no matter what field. It is based on some kind of insider knowledge of the ridiculousness of being in show business.” 

    Most of the work can be traced to Hollywood, but some is about art. I wonder if Waters taps into the ridiculousness of that business as well? “I find the extremes of the art world
    hilarious. You can’t open it up to regular people — THEY HATE IT!” he screams. Waters then excitedly shows me a piece in which the text reads, “Contemporary Art Hates You.” “It does!” he cries. “They can’t learn to SEE! That piece of art on the wall DOES hate them, and I find that delightful. It’s a business that only a few people can see the magic trick. And if you can really do it, like Mike Kelley can — an old rag on the floor, and turn that into a piece in a museum — THAT IS WHAT ART IS! About being a magician. So the people are mad before they look at it. Because it makes them feel stupid. And they are!”

     WATERS-2009-Look-Out!
    WATERS-2009-The-Process

    Waters is always one step ahead of you. He’s unpredictable, and he makes an art of it. What might be considered shocking, Waters will find tame, borderline boring. If it’s something mundane, he’ll be thrilled and deem it outrageous. He refuses to be pigeonholed. So is he just a contrarian? Not always, which I guess means yes. 

    “I’m not against all the things that most people get mad about [with] art. And I always say to artists that hate rich people, ‘Well, that’s stupid. Who’s going to buy your work?’ It’s not like Obama is giving out art stamps! So, I’m always amazed at that. How can you hate rich people?” And that goes for the artists, too. Waters thinks an artist can never be too rich. “Good for them. I’m happy for them. I never understand resentment about that. Good for you! You thought this up. Who would complain about that?” 

    We keep flipping through his art folder. There seems to be a theme, certain eras in the movies, then there’s a giant roasted ham. It’s big, it’s sumptuous, it’s Easter Sunday. But to Waters that image stands for the movie actor who is a ham, a visual pun for bad acting. “It’s a very negative review, and I celebrate that a lot,” he joyfully explained.
    He also celebrates Catholicism with his piece Catholic Sin, where there’s a diagram of three milk bottles depicting the difference between mortal and venial sins. Milk bottles measuring the souls of Catholics — a diagram straight from one of his Catechism books. Next is a picture of a mildly handsome ’80s guy’s face juxtaposed against a picture of a large erect penis. Turns out it’s the face of infamous wife-killer Scott Peterson and a generic porno cock. It’s called, True Crime. Waters riffs on “the unspoken thing, that people think serial killers are hot.” 

    WATERS-2009-True-Crime-#6

    Waters’ early films can be considered subversive, but the director begs to differ. “If any movie I’ve ever done was subversive, it would be Hairspray, because regular families watched it, not realizing it encouraged their children to date black people.” He says this in all seriousness and continues, “All contemporary art is supposed to be subversive. It’s supposed to wreck what came before. It’s supposed to damage and change what people think of as fine art. So I guess if you can think of something new, that is subversive, and that is what everybody in the contemporary art world is trying to do. That’s their job.”

    Hollywood Smile Train is one piece of Waters’ that I would call subversive, or at the very least, galling. Waters explained the inspiration behind applying cleft palates to movie stars’ faces. It came from the numerous billboards and magazine ads of these  unfortunate children. “I’m always suspicious of charities that have HUGE advertising budgets. I’m not so sure [how much] that child with the cleft palate got. As much as they advertise, I have a right to make fun of it.” Waters admits that it is probably the most tasteless piece in the show. But maybe more than poor taste, or subversive, it’s just nervy. 

    Waters loves nerve. “I love when the art says, ‘It’s finished.’ And you got nerve, to show it to the dealer, then show it to world, and then show it to the collectors. And I love to see groups of collectors, because they’ll never admit that it’s too far for them. That’s what starts the next movement. I love to see that thin line, when… Oh, come on … OH COME ON! … is what I end up liking the best. It’s extreme. It’s supposed to be extreme. I respect extremity, even if I don’t agree with it.” 

    WATERS-contemporary-art..

    Extremity in the First Degree — I think Waters has been guilty of that from the very beginning. And he practices it to this day. Even though he doesn’t think shock value “works anymore and is old-fashioned,” I still think he’s capable of coming up with some pretty provocative material. His thoughts on art are anything but old-school, and they might still be called subversive, even today. But I sort of get what he means. He’s so polite and well-mannered that it just seems seditious. The homespun needlepoint throw pillow on his couch — it adds a touch of comfort. And to know his mother made it for him, well, that’s just touching. BUT IT’S A PICTURE OF A POLICE CAR IN FLAMES! That John! 

     

    See John Waters: “Rear Projection” at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, April 11 – May 23, 2009 and at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York City, April 3 – May 2, 2009.

     
  • Let’s Go To The Movies

    Let’s Go To The Movies

    Pirates received its Los Angeles premiere at REDCAT recently: a visual and aural multi-screen feast/assault that covered all four walls of the theater. The audience, many of whom sat on the floor, were surrounded like the victims of the raid taking place onscreen(s). The only way out was through the exit door, which guilty-looking art lovers frequently resorted to, smiling awkwardly as they fled.Paul McCarthy, famed for his shit sculptures, chocolate butt plugs and other artistic inquiries that are lauded as forceful critiques of consumerism, has now plundered the pirate tradition in a style that is surely closer to the seafaring realities of yore than the Disneyland ride and movie franchise it cruelly parodies.As soon as the industrial-sized cans of Hershey’s chocolate syrup came crashing through the hatchway, the audience knew it was in for a McCarthy-style barrage of blood and shit on the high seas. Swollen-bellied, bulbous-nosed, giant-eared old salts squirted chocolate syrup from prosthetic phalluses, simulated masturbation with broom handles, sawed through noses and generally had a roaring good time. Blood was flying everywhere, pouring down the lens to a deafening soundtrack of drilling, screaming and obscene Yaaars and Aye-Ayes.

    Upon any one of nine screens at any given moment one was greeted with such sights as a naked woman crawling around on a carpet in front of a ship-shaped bar, caressing herself with pained, imploring looks; a man with a freshly hacked-off leg being ridden by a droopy-nosed harpy in a blood-soaked scullery maid’s outfit; and the figure of the pegboy, famed in maritime lore, evoked by a sporty nautical gent in blazer and seaman’s cap who danced around a bottle of Morgan’s rum before frigging himself on a giant peg (the pegboy was a selected crew member who was obliged to keep his anus dilated in this fashion for the pleasure of his shipmates while on long voyages). Somewhere in there a parody of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was apparently being played out, but it was impossible to keep up with all the references. The playfully tasteless mayhem continued for the standard theatrical 90 minutes, descending eventually into such popular piratical pursuits as cannibalism and torture (despite their cartoonishness, the bone-splintering amputation scenes were not for the squeamish).

    It was fun to watch and it was obviously fun to make. To those of us unfortunates unable to draw upon an arsenal of critical theory in order to make the work appropriately rigorous, it was an old-fashioned bloodbath, an unabashed extension of the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis. This was cinema divested of such tiresome niceties as plot, character and dialogue, focusing exclusively on filth and gore, which, after all, is what most people go to the movies for. Visually stimulating, it therefore possessed value as entertainment. Only the crowd, strangely, did not seem entertained.

    One would think that such a scathingly visceral overload might provoke some sort of reaction. But looking around the audience — whose expressions it was easy to gauge as everybody was obliged to continually twist and crane around in order to view the different screens — there was no laughter, no smiling. It looked like an uncomfortable experience for many, especially those who were on dates. Most people wore looks of tolerant amusement or puzzled seriousness. Resistant to the notion of mere entertainment, they seemed unsure of how they were supposed to react. They knew they were supposed to like it because it was supposed to be art, but appeared uncertain about whether many of the depicted acts could be morally sanctioned.

    It seems a shame that a work of such crazed vitality should be the exclusive province of an audience that insists upon extracting or impressing meaning upon it, when the multiplex crowd would surely get a lot more pleasure out of it. The average moviegoer, quite forgivably, might fail to interpret the sordid merrymaking on view as a critique of the Hollywood dream factory and a metaphor for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In years to come, Caribbean Pirates will probably serve as a worthy corollary to these times, but the only people who are likely to make that connection now are the chosen art house set, who made up their minds about Abu Ghraib long before McCarthy went to such excessive lengths to tell them what they already knew.

    This is a work that lends itself generously to the possibilities of audience participation. It isn’t being marketed properly. Why not release it to a less discerning audience: one that would actually enjoy it? ■

  • Art Ceases to Desist

    Art Ceases to Desist

    With today’s digital era so rich in explicit displays of virtually every aspect of the human experience — including amateur exhibitions of bodily functions beamed to us live via webcam — the idea of museum exhibits raising hell in America may seem, well, passé?

    But a generation ago a handful of works by artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano ignited a national pissing match (if you will) over art, its public funding and, ostensibly, freedom of speech.

    Of course, the volume of societal dialog on public art exhibitions and taxpayers’ financing controversial works had been escalating long before the visions of Mapplethorpe and Serrano were hung on the proverbial gallery wall, but it was those two artists who were at Ground Zero when simmering cultural tensions exploded into a volatile debate.

    Looking at it now, Serrano’s 1987 Piss Christ seems an odd selection for what was then denounced as the apex of petty vulgarity fraudulently pawned off as “art” by a bored bourgeoisie looking for a cheap thrill on the taxpayer’s tab. The photograph delivers its punch not through the sublimely beautiful image of a radiant crucifix bathed in warm hues of amber, but rather lands a haymaker through the title of the work itself—and what it reveals.

    Those two words — Piss Christ — turned a richly divine image into something the mob saw as starkly demonic. Yet reverse the words and televangelists would be selling it.

    But it wasn’t until two years later, in May of 1989, that Serrano’s urine really hit the fan. Seizing on the fact that the National Endowment for the Arts had indirectly awarded Serrano a $15,000 grant, New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato saw a golden (so to speak) opportunity to grandstand on publicly funded “filth” and took to the Senate floor to tear up Piss Christ both figuratively and literally. D’Amato’s esteemed colleague from North Carolina, Sen. Jesse Helms (think Strother Martin’s character in Cool Hand Luke), who had been agitating for a brawl with the NEA and its damn Yankee liberal supporters, jumped in with his buddy Al.

    “The Senator from New York is absolutely correct in his indignation and in his description of the blasphemy of the so-called artwork,” Helms said. “I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk.”

    Helms’ view of Mapplethorpe was decidedly more ominous both in tone and implication, with the astute senator alerting the New York Times that the artist was “an acknowledged homosexual.” If Serrano’s work rocked conventional perceptions of the Judeo-Christian boat, Helms undoubtedly saw Mapplethorpe’s unconventional perspective on bullwhips and black men as the wall hangings from the seventh ring of hell.

    And Jesse wasn’t alone. Mapplethorpe’s work resulted in protests and criminal busts in Cincinnati, where city fathers charged the Contemporary Art Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, with obscenity and a jury of mid-Westerners delivered an acquittal.

    Those were some big headlines two decades ago. But if the argument has faded, its legacy has not. “The culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s changed the very structure of arts funding in ways that now often go unremarked or unnoticed,” says Richard Meyer, an associate professor of art history at USC who has written extensively on the subject. “Individual artists are no longer eligible, for example, for funding from the NEA and virtually no one expects—or applies to—the federal government to support dissident, controversial or otherwise oppositional art.” Meyer says the result has been a withering away of the “artistic culture of social dissent,” erosion he calls “a genuine loss and a great shame.”

    Perhaps. But in hindsight it’s hard to shake a sense of uniquely American frivolity that surrounded some of the proceedings, indulging our super-sized taste with an over-dramatized battle between freedom and censorship.

    The fact is that even angry grandstanders like Helms and D’Amato publicly acknowledged the fundamental right of Serrano and Mapplethorpe to make and display their art. Consider that in comparison to the artists in the Netherlands today, who need round-the-clock protection (provided by the government) for having dared to offend Islamic sensibilities. The very credible threats against these artists’ lives today puts the rants of the Jesse & Al Show, and even the lame busts, in stark perspective.

    And Serrano’s back with a new show—entitled simply Shit and featuring yet more of the artist’s, um, excretions—that opened at the Yvon Lambert Gallery in Chelsea in September. As Artillery went to press, there’s no word yet of any senators denouncing him from that chamber.

    But I suspect if the exhibit’s patrons listen carefully as they line up to appreciate the oversize photographic servings of feces, they may well hear the chuckling drawl of the ghost of a good ol’ boy reminding them, “You get what you pay for.”

    That goes for the government as well as the art. ■

  • Kerry James Marshall

    Kerry James Marshall

    This article originally appeared in our November/December 2008 issue on Everyday Politics:

    Nov/Dec 2008 Artillery cover.

     

    In a text written for this show and displayed on one of the gallery walls, Kerry James Marshall says “I am working on paintings that address the theme of LOVE.” “Love” is less a theme than a pretext for Marshall’s real subject, which is history. There is nothing of the “idyll” in any of these paintings — and “wistful” is not a word that can be easily attached to their calculated bits of romantic fancy. At the risk of sounding either latently racist or completely loony, as I was looking at the paintings, a line from an old Sondheim show tune ran through my head: “Liaisons – what’s happened to them?”

    Like the undercurrent of disillusionment and desperation that runs just beneath the flirtation and frolic of the Bergman/Sondheim vehicle, there is a kind of sadness and not a little anger beneath these “Rococo” motives (e.g., a woman’s body sinuously stretched out in the grass of a clearing — singly or in a couple; a couple hiking or chasing over a dune or hilltop) that, today, are a stock of kitsch imagery. Marshall alludes to the kitsch in the more schematic passages of his “pastoral” settings (fields and bluffs of grasses and wildflowers). Marshall conveys a kind of impatience through abstraction — or obliteration — for his own apparent pseudo-nostalgia. The landscapes aren’t lost in the miasma of gossamer fabrics and the rosy filtered light of wooded parkland or sunsets, but deliberately whittled away at the edges, brushed out in broad, flat pink strokes. This is about historical revisionism and displacement; also, simply power.

    Africans or (African-French) don’t begin to appear in French painting until approximately the early 19th century. They appear somewhat earlier in Italian and Spanish painting in the late Renaissance. So what? How many Africans were there in France at the time? And just how many Africans made it to the European royal courts — where these paintings took their inspiration — anyway? Inspiration might be overstating it. The kind of pastoral fantasy worked by Fragonard, Watteau and Boucher was exactly that. It was sheerly escapist fare even for the aristocracy for whom it was intended. The vast majority of white provincial French people were similarly closed off from this world.

    Kerry James Marshall, Portrait of John Punch (Angry Black May 1646), 2008.

    Even before we view Marshall’s “love” pastorales, though, we have a sense of this confrontation with Eurocentric ideals of beauty or nobility in a series of portraits hanging in the front gallery. They’re formal portraits of beautiful people. One, a proud, somber, distinctly African and very black face sporting a thick mane of dreads, in a sable-colored sweater has a lion’s bearing that has nothing to do with the over-sized cowl neck of his sweater. African or not, this could be the mien of an Elizabethan lord — or conceivably an urban intellectual from anywhere.

    Directly across from this portrait is another, somewhat angrier, lordly black man, this one swagged in gold chains — much as he would have been had he been painted by, say, Titian. Titian never painted a black aristocrat, but he might have if there were any to be found in Venice.

    Marshall is doing more here than simply confronting European notions and traditions, though. He’s claiming them for his own — which, as for any late 20th- to 21st-century American artist, they are. But is there really a point to photoshopping (in painterly fashion) black people in or “pink-washing” the fantasy out? It’s as if Marshall wants a rewrite of art history. Africans are noticeably absent from European painting until well into the 19th century — an implacable historical fact that is pointless to argue with.

    Marshall’s portraits are undeniably beautiful; but the most interesting work here by far are the comic panels in the last gallery from Marshall’s “RHYTHM MASTR” series — a very contemporary order of cultural and historical confrontation — where past and present collide in the kind of gritty, multi-cultural, polyglot urban tide pools ubiquitous in cities like Los Angeles. In one panel, a voodoo idol or ceremonial figure is seemingly conjured by a contemporary figure in the foreground with a bongo drum. In another, titled Ho’s Stroll, the sense of anywhere/everywhere is explicit: “What is this place?” A cloud of Asian characters issue from a van, while the protagonist takes on the 20th century: “If Lincoln supposta freed our asses in 1865, why the fuck was we gittin our heads cracked tryin to vote, in 1965?” This is where it gets interesting: at the divide (or not) between cultural and political disenfranchisement. Why do I have the feeling we’ll be asking similar questions this year in states like Ohio and Florida?

    Kerry James Marshall: PORTRAITS, PIN-UPS And Wistful Romantic Idylls, Exhibition Dates: September 6- October 24, 2008, at Koplin Del Rio, Culver City, CA. Images courtesy Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Culver Ctiy, CA

  • First Lady Love

    First Lady Love

    It all started with a dream. “I was in a small library, and she opened the door. She put her file folders down and pinned me to the wall, kissing me,” recalls painter Sarah Ferguson. “She was so, so forthright. I found it very refreshing.”

    The woman in the dream was Hillary Clinton. From that day in 2007 forward, the former presidential candidate has been the primary focus of Ferguson’s work. In addition to oil portraits, Ferguson has also created numerous photo collages, some of which can be seen on her website and in a self-published book, Hillary and I. Her obsession with the politician seems one part feminist, three parts erotic.

    “Hillary is portrayed in the media as cold and calculated, but I see her as sexual,” states Ferguson unequivocally, and she’s on a mission to get others to recognize Hillary’s sensuous side. “When I read Maureen Dowd, the Hillary she concocted in her head was so different than the one in my head. In a 100 years, people might look back at Dowd’s writing and form an idea of what Hillary was like. With these paintings, I’m trying to document my viewpoint.”

    In Ferguson’s East Village studio, Hillarys abound. There’s a close-up of a pissed-off looking Hillary titled “Pink Hillary,” the first of the series. “I love the expression. Those eyes! She’s so sensitive, so prickly!” Ferguson coos. A portrait of Hillary pondering a lizard shows the viewer a softer, more private side of the public figure. Yet another canvas places Ferguson in the foreground, sitting in a chair with a microphone between her legs, while Hill looks on from the background, microphone held horizontally in both hands. Ferguson painted that one shortly after the Democratic Convention. “I’m holding the microphone in my lap, away from my mouth, because my voice has been denied.”

    Among these many moods of Hillary, an eight-foot-tall portrait stands out. Hillary’s face is molded in a familiar expression — lips tight, chin slightly raised, her demeanor serious and authoritative. To her detractors, this “don’t fuck with me, fellas” look might epitomize what they dislike about her. The twist here is she’s buck naked, staring you down as if to say, “What are you looking at?” Her aging flesh and sagging breasts are painted in loving detail. “I could have made her more erotic, but this is the beauty of the real. There’s no artifice. She’s stripped bare,” Ferguson explains.

    Photo by Rainer Hosch
    Photo by Rainer Hosch

    On Christmas Day 2007, she posted an image of Naked Hillary on Flickr.com. “I was so involved in political blogging, and I wanted to talk about things that weren’t being discussed, like the sexism [that Hillary provoked]. Within a week, I had 500 hits.” Things continued at that pace until Flickr tagged the image at the end of February. But Ferguson was happy with the results of her experiment. “The only way to find it was by typing ‘hillary naked’ in the search, so at that moment, there were a lot of people who wanted to see Hillary naked! I really tapped into something.”

    Until about six years ago, Ferguson, 43, was pursuing a career as a math professor. But shortly after she was awarded tenure at Wayne State University in Detroit, Ferguson asked for a leave of absence and moved to New York in 2002 to paint full time. She enrolled in an MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in 2006, and graduated this past spring. “Both math and painting are a search for truth, and both are a battle. I would end up with a big pile of scratch paper, trying to figure out a formula, and I must have painted over Naked Hillary five times, trying to get it right.”

    Interestingly, Ferguson had one of her biggest breakthroughs working on a 7′ x 8′ canvas entitled Hardball, that depicts Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann jerking each other off. “Since I don’t care about them like I do Hillary, I was free to make mistakes.” The violet blue tones of the canvas make it clear that the couple is watching television. “Porn?” I ask. “No, they’re watching Hillary!” Ferguson replies. Silly me.

    With Hillary’s bid fading into history, Ferguson intends to continue painting her muse. In her most recent work, Ferguson put Hillary’s head on a doll’s body. “It’s a little surreal. There’s some detachment. It’s less personal. A dealer who looked at my previous work said most artists don’t work from complete identification. But I had to go through that living with her, talking to her, having her as an imaginary friend.” Ferguson sees this new Hillary as a universal mother to us all. “She’s looking down and her head is like the size of your mother’s head when you were getting your ass wiped. It’s like she is there to take care and provide and clean things up. And the heavens are there, and the sky. It’s death and rebirth. I think her role as senator will be much larger now,” says Ferguson, with a hopeful, lusty glint in her eye. ■

  • The Poseur

    The Poseur

    While going to school for graphic design, I was required to take a figure drawing class. My father, of course, was totally against it. “They’re gonna make you draw naked people! I’m not paying for you to go to school and draw men’s weenies, I tell ya what!” I paid for it myself and shortly thereafter arrived at my first day of class, ready to draw some weenies.

    The class was packed and there were only a few seats left. I chose one in the back next to a young woman wearing men’s clothes. I sat down and got settled in when she leaned over and said, “I was late too so don’t feel bad.” “Oh good!” I said, “I couldn’t find the room!” She told me her name was “Charlie.” She was a young, heavy-set black girl who liked to wear men’s vintage clothes: pressed slacks and button-up shirts that she tucked in under a dark red sports coat that she wore everyday, even when it was hot. She also wore black wingtip shoes and shaved her eyebrows. Over the next few weeks we became friends, helping each other with our projects and taking breaks together. She was very sweet and talented and seemed exceptionally bright for her age, 15. She was in a bridge program for “gifted” high schoolers that needed a more challenging atmosphere than public high school. She wanted to be a cartoonist. We became pals and things seemed pretty swell.

    One day while we were having lunch, she wanted to show me her new drawings. They were ideas she had for a comic book. “Check these out. I think you’ll like them. They’re kinda sexy, but I think they’re cool.” She pulled out a small stack of papers and gave them to me. My sweet, young, gifted friend had drawn pictures of big, black muscular pit bulls with enormous penises. They were very graphic. The dogs looked like they were weightlifters and their dicks were so huge that they curved up over the dog’s head packed full of veins. She even drew the foreskin and little droplets of pre-cum on the tips.
    I quietly looked them over, wondering what the hell I was going to say about them. Then she tried to explain, “See, I have this thing for my dog, Charlie Jr. He’s so hot! I know it’s kinda fucked-up, but I totally get off on him. Do you think I’m crazy?”

    “No, well, I’m confused. What do you mean you get off on him?”

    “Well, I like to let him lick me… down there. He likes it. I also like to jack him off.”
    As she told me this I couldn’t help but wonder if my dad had been right. The art world is obsessed with penises, human or otherwise.

    “Well,” I said. “I think that’s really strange. I mean, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, I’m flattered that you felt you could trust me with this secret, but I don’t really understand why someone would let a dog lick their privates. I’m just really paranoid about germs.”

    “Oh, dogs are very healthy. Did you know their mouths contain a natural antiseptic? I mean, you’re gay; you should be more worried about getting something from guys than from a dog. I’m just saying.”
    I nodded my head and gave the drawing back to her. We spent the remaining minutes quietly eating our lunch. Once again I had found myself befriending an odd character that I was going to have to somehow avoid for the next eight weeks when the semester ended.

    At home later that evening I got a phone call. It was Charlie. “Hey Kurt. I hope I didn’t freak you out earlier today. I just think you’re cool and I wanted to share with you.” “No problem,” I said. “We’re cool.” I told her that my main issue was germs. And as I elaborated on this I could hear her panting. She was making short, squeaky noises. Then she stared whispering, “Fuck me… fuck my pussy… fuck my pussy… oh! ohhh!.. Did you come?” She asked me. “No!” I said. “Did you just masturbate with your dog over the phone?”

    “No. I wanted to jerk off with you.”
    “Look, I’m gay. That means I’m not attracted to you or your dog. I don’t know how many different ways I need to explain this to you! Please, just leave me alone, Charlie.”

    Then she became angry. “Oh you think you’re so big being a fag and all. You think that’s cool? Fuck you! You’re nothing! You’re a fucking AIDS faggot!”

    I just then envisioned her walking into class with a gun and shooting me in front of everyone and then turning the gun on herself after she screamed “I did it for you, Charlie Jr.!” So I tried to appeal to the gifted kid in her. “Come on… I thought you were bigger than this.”

    “What did you call me?” she screamed. “You call me a nigger?”
    “What? NO! I said…”

    “You mother fucker! You’re dead, you butt- fucking AIDS asshole!” She hung up the phone. Now I was scared. I sat up all night wondering what was going to happen in class the next day. I had to go, it was midterms. I finally fell asleep and woke the next day full of dread.

    I arrived to class later that day. Charlie was sitting in her usual seat. She didn’t speak to me. After we presented our midterm assignments I got up to go to the bathroom. I returned to find the instructor and a few of the students gathered around my desk. The instructor saw me walk in and held up one of Charlie’s X-rated pit bull illustrations. “What’s the meaning of this?” He was mad as hell and Charlie had her face in her hands sobbing. “He made me look at them. He made me!” She had put her drawings on my desk and told the instructor I drew them and made her look at them. Everyone was looking at me like I was Jeffery Dahlmer. All I could come up with was, “Those aren’t mine. They’re hers! She’s the one making me look at them!” She started crying louder… “He made me jack off his dog!” The students howled. My only option was to calmly gather my things and leave with echoes of “Dude, what the fuck?” and “Sick!” I felt like I was going to throw up.

    I walked out to my car, sick to my stomach and feeling the need to go home and take a long hot shower. As I got closer to my car, I saw that there was a note under the windshield wiper. I prayed it was ticket and not a note from Charlie. Of course, it was a note from her and, after having read it, I strangely felt a little better. It read: “All you had to do was fuck me.”

     
  • No Beauty, No Truth

    No Beauty, No Truth

    Mike Kelley’s first feature length movie takes place mainly at a high school. Cheery bright classrooms are full of 30-year-old sloppy students. Auditoriums stage assemblies with campy musicals and pageants. Gleaming lockers line the polished hallways. It’s a regular Sadie Hawkins Day, where white trash meets Goth.

    The opening credits roll against the backdrop of a bleached out sunset over the ocean, with hues of moldy greens and dried-blood reds. An over-the-top symphonic soundtrack accompanies this endless sequence of soap opera sunsets until finally the film’s title Day is Done appears. Next, a harsh juxtaposition of hundreds of slimy earthworms wriggling and slithering to raw psychedelic mind-blowing noise.  Then an average-looking high school with your not-so-average student faculty. So far so good, looks and feels like Mike Kelley. Keep it up.

    A trio of ballerinas with white painted faces and black leotards dance through the empty hallways. A train whistle blasts from the intercom announcing a change of pace. Vampires and creepy bad-skinned adults make up the school staff who go about their busy day xeroxing and talking on phones and making no eye contact. And no one is aware that everyone is severely fucked up.

    This is probably the first 10 minutes of the film. The audience has been laughing the whole time. I had a grin glued on my face. Day is Done is practically a feel-good movie. It’s easy to identify Kelley’s influences in this film, yet his own vision as writer and director comes through loud and clear. His casting, costumes, music and nonsensical plots comprise his signature sensibility. His characters embody every hippie, yippie, punk rocker and performance artist he’s ever encountered, who in turn project Kelley’s own mischief, horror, bad taste, sexploitation, perversion, religion and ugliness. Is it just a coincidence the film’s subtitle is “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2-#32”?  No, of course it’s not a coincidence, neither are his film references. Kelley’s having a ball with Day is Done; it’s practically a self-parody, and incidentally a kick-ass soundtrack he and Scott Benzel collaborate on.

    Mouvement Portfolio #1 (Picking a Mary), 2005
    Mouvement Portfolio #1 (Picking a Mary), 2005

    Everyone agrees that Mike Kelley is a major American artist whose influence has had an impact on younger artists today. His films can’t boast the same claim, however. That’s not to say his films or videos suck. But I have to say, his filmmaking doesn’t measure up to his art making. His art stands alone as original, whereas his films have whiffs of Waters, Lynch, Meyer, Warhol, Craven and others. Kelley’s art borrows thematic elements, but his films borrow stylistically.

    Day is Done practically rips off Waters. For instance, the way he uses children in the film. Pure unabashed exploitation. Waters was famous for this, as of course was W. C. Fields. Other scenes are right out of Pink Flamingos and Kelley is actually able to pull it off (which must make Waters green with envy nowadays). Like Waters, Kelley draws on real experiences. Day is Done’s premise is taken literally from a high school yearbook — particularly the quotes and captions that go with the school photos. You know, the ones you or I never had next to our picture: “Second place Prom Queen,” “Member of the Speech Club,” “Captain of the volleyball team.” I would guess Kelley never did either. Like Waters, Kelley doesn’t have to go far for his inspiration. He finds it in his own backyard.

    They say truth is stranger than fiction. What about when it’s exaggerated and exploited? So is it even truth then? I wondered about that, and about what sets Kelley’s Day is Done apart from John Waters. I thought about how void of beauty nearly all of Kelley’s work are. He’s the artist responsible for turning “warm and fuzzy” into germ-infested bombs. Then I thought about that Keats line, “Beauty is truth.” It seems weird that I would think of truth and beauty when there was absolutely neither present in Day is Done. Both are conspicuous by their absence. It would seem more fitting if I thought about filth and lies.

    Maybe Kelley doesn’t see beauty in truth. Some things are ugly and it could be that truth is one of them. War is ugly and certainly true. But it’s not truth. So therefore it’s not beauty. Kelley’s work is deep-rooted, and probably stems from the truth, but he never finds beauty in it the way, say, Larry Clark does. Kelley’s preoccupation with high school and the deeply troubled period of adolescence might represent a genuinely negative experience in high school, similar to Clark’s own obsession with adolescence. But Kelley adds a layer of irony, with his faux fascination and adoration of these “normal” people from the high school yearbook, and all their extracurricular activities. So maybe it’s not truth after all. Maybe it’s even envy. These are the jocks, the squares, the goody-two shoes, who may have fascinated, but most likely repelled the likes of Kelley and other outsiders. To him, normal people were the freaks, like Marilyn in The Munsters. And admittedly, it’s hard to imagine Mike Kelley as a high school student.

    But don’t worry. There’s really no reason to ponder, pontificate, deconstruct or intellectually wank off to Kelley’s Day is Done. You can just sit and laugh. The film certainly has merit and I think everyone should go see it, especially if you like comedies. But don’t expect a plot, don’t expect much sense, and don’t expect beauty.

    Photos by Fredrik Nilsen; courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery

  • Catherine Opie

    Catherine Opie

    California is known as the land of fruits and nuts. And it’s true, we’ve got wacky environmentalists, kooky lefty liberals and fruity homosexuals. And artist Catherine Opie actually fits all three categories, sans the loaded adjectives. Nothing wacky about Cathy, and nothing kooky about her politics, and certainly nothing fruity about her sexuality. But why does California attract such a rambunctious group of people? I’m hoping Ms. Opie can give me some answers.

    I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Opie, who was just back from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she was the only Los Angeles artist selected to be in the SITE Biennial. There she showed her new series of children’s portraits. And portraiture is what she’s famous for. But I was more interested to talk about her survey show at the Orange County Museum of Art, where Opie’s work is more about California.

    Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 from “Freeway” series, 1994

    When I arrived at her house in the historic West Adams district of central Los Angeles, I experienced a slight sense of deja vu. I had just seen her OCMA show “In and Around Home,” and many of the photographs in the exhibit were taken, well, at her home, which she shares with her partner and their two children and many pets. Her dwelling was very comfortable and welcoming. A short wooden picket fence opened into a front yard filled with big shade trees and children’s toys, complete with an anti-Bush banner hanging on the cool breezy porch. Constant activity was going on when I was greeted by the artist and a very friendly Doberman: a housekeeper was running the vacuum in the living room and in the kitchen workers were fixing the plumbing. Opie was very gracious, offering me something to drink, but then we quickly got down to business, as she had to take the plumber to the local hardware store for a part.   

    One thing is for sure, she’s very proud of her show in Orange County, which brings together many elements of her work she’s been addressing for almost 20 years now, and two new series of photographs never exhibited before here in So. Cal. When I mistakenly referred to it as a retrospective, she reminded me, “I’m still young!” At 45, her baby-face features and boyish thick mop of brunette hair (not a single grey!), reveal an artist very comfortable with herself and her art. She clarified for me, “It’s a very specific show in regards to my ideas around community and landscape as well as Southern California. A lot of people always think of me around the portraits, and never really go beyond that even though that’s only a quarter of my work. But it always goes back to that, that I made this body of work in the early ’90s.” She goes on to explain how the portrait series actually were “a little bit off what I normally make.” And that’s what makes the Orange County show distinctive, the exclusion of her portraits, which were an extension of the theme community, but more specifically, her own milieu and particularly during the AIDS crisis in the homosexual world.

    Catherine Opie, Miggi & Ilene, Los Angeles, California, 1995

    As Opie was talking about all this, it occurred to me that I had not ever looked beyond the surface of her photos in that way. I never really considered her work as political. For example, her famous freeway photos are gorgeous to look at with their careful composition, wonderful light and abstract quality. But they’re also about destruction, and ultimately, political. And sure, I knew her portraits were political in the subculture kind of way; even dysfunctional families can be considered a political topic. But her politics go beyond that. Opie is concerned about the bigger picture. And living in California fostered a lot of that thinking.

    In that sense, Opie’s show at OCMA brings the photographer full circle. Although she’s not a native, (she moved out from Ohio at age 13) she grew up in Orange County. And “In and Around Home” documents her life and neighborhood in central Los Angeles. But the show starts in Valencia, with her MFA show at CalArts, where her first concerns with the raping of landscape were documented. Tenderly shooing her Doby away for the umpteenth time, she mused, “What disturbs me more is the use of landscape in California. When I moved from Ohio in the early ’70s, we grew up surrounded by acres of cornfields. And I got to grow up surrounded by beautiful landscape. Orange County was still orange groves. When we moved to California, we moved to this burgeoning Master Plan community called Poway Rancho Bernardo. So I watched from my backyard all of this development happen. And it used to be vineyards and rocks that I climbed on, and sage and chaparral, and I’m really interested in nature. I really like nature as a person. I mean, we have chickens!”

    Catherine Opie, Abandoned TV

    It so happens, “Master Plan” became the title of her thesis show. Most artists would be hesitant to include their college work in a mid-career survey, but OCMA curator Elizabeth Armstrong insisted on including “Master Plan,” when Opie mildly suggested it and dusted off the negatives.

    “Master Plan,” is a body of work that chronicles a tract-housing project under construction in Valencia where Opie was attending school from 1986-88. The work is very conceptual and some of the photographs are not her strongest work when viewed individually. But as an installation, it holds its own, and is not even dated in the least. Her message and what Opie is trying to communicate still rings true today. “For me it was going beyond the image, and really talking more about people’s choices in terms how they create community and also the white flight from the urban environment. I came from the suburbs. I was a suburban country club kid. Why do these environments exist? Why do people have rules and regulations within these environments? What do they serve? And really trying to explore that.”

    Most of the photos in “Master Plan” are rather banal and flat. For instance the photograph of the Troidal family, who were interviewed and became part of the project, reads like a straight studio portrait, nothing particularly special. The family’s kitschy décor became still life photographs. At first glance, it appears Opie might be mocking the people who go for that style of living, surrounding themselves with bad taste so bad, even John Waters would not find it terribly interesting. When I suggested this, she set me straight immediately. “I was interested in not just [taking pictures of] it, but why people made those choices.” I did however get Opie to agree that living in a gated community would be a cookie-cutter hell of offensive blandness. “Yeah, there’s a little bit of imaging it that way, like, wow, how tacky and horrible these are and I’m glad I don’t choose to live in that kind of environment.” But ultimately she is more concerned about the drastic alterations to the landscape that such a mainstream lifestyle requires. She elaborates, “Part of the problem is the fact that the resources that it takes to maintain these developments is completely unprecedented in relationship to what California can do in providing water and energy. So what bothers me most about these communities is that they’re not approached from some kind of sustainability. That’s what bothers me the most, is watching this major acreage go, but every single house in Palmdale at this point, the technology has, that they can include solar, that goes into the grid. So you don’t have Stage 3 Alerts anymore! So these housing developments are only doing it to profit from it. But it has nothing about giving back to California as a state, or the notion of nature.”

    Catherine Opie, Troidal Family, 1986-88

    Fortunately for Opie, she has an ocean breeze coming through her Craftsman-style home, because I don’t know if she could handle the guilt if she had to use air-conditioning, (LA was experiencing a heat wave at the time.) It was refreshing to hear an artist talk about topics like environment, community and politics. Artists are typically known for their self-indulgence, but Opie couldn’t be further from this stereotype. And her art works beautifully with her politics. Take for instance her Surfer photographs. A whole room is dedicated to that series at OCMA, and you can practically feel the ocean mist and smell the sea salt when surrounded by the large scale works. This series doesn’t seem to fit with the others in the exhibit, but after hearing Opie’s manifesto, its inclusion is necessary. Opie is about California, and we can’t just skip the beaches and that community.

    So is California to blame for spawning liberal environ-mentalists? This beautiful terrain replete with mountains, deserts, forests and beaches — that’s what California is, and when residents see the stripping and destruction of this wondrous land, they get upset. Next thing you know, you’re a concerned citizen. What happened to our clean air? Our beaches we used to be able to swim in?

    You wonder how so many people can simply not care. You’d have to maybe live in a . . . gated community? Or maybe sheltered in your safe ritzy millionaire home? Another series of photographs called “Houses” are included in the OCMA show, which are of Beverly Hills mansion facades. Why are they in the exhibit, and why did Opie bother to take the photos? Are both of these communities about comfort and apathy? Opie’s work is not didactic and it doesn’t make value judgments either. And that ambiguity is what makes all her work very accessible.

    Catherine Opie, Untitled #27 from “Freeway” series, 1994

    “In and Around Home” was first shown at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. But when it traveled to OCMA, both Opie and co-curator Elizabeth Armstrong agreed to expand the exhibition. In part because the space was much larger, hence the decision to include other works that would further expand on that particular theme, which is clearly California, hence the surfer photos, the mini-malls and the freeway ramps. The exhibition is divided into the different series displayed in their own spaces, for the most part. So when working your way through the show, a certain sense of where Opie’s coming from really comes to light.

    The only body of work that seemed out of place with the theme was “1999,” where Opie set out on a cross-country road trip to create a series of photographs that would “represent the idea of Americana, in relationship to people’s fear of Y2K.” But in hindsight, Opie added, “Now that 9/11 happened, Y2K looks very foolish, in terms of fear. . . The fear that gets whipped-up within our culture is just mind-boggling to me.” Although the photographs are some of the strongest work in the show, they’re not California, and perhaps they relate when Opie leaves California. Opie does have that natural talent when looking through the camera lens. Her photos harken to the greats such as Walker Evans and Ansel Adams, and perhaps those two come to mind with her appreciation for nature and environment.

    The “1999” photographs come before the last room, which is “In and Around Home.” And now we’re back home. Opie’s nearly twenty years of work does give a glimpse into the artist’s life and work, if one can ever separate the two. And don’t forget, that’s not all of Opie’s work. If you add the ’90s portraits and her most recent children’s portraits, then perhaps we’d get the whole picture. Her portraits may be what everyone thinks of when they think of Opie, and they may be the showier work, but they’re not her story. And the arc is what you get at OCMA. But one story Opie told me about growing up in Ohio actually might be the most revealing. “We spent most of the time swimming in the polluted lake,” she laughs. “When I grew up, the lake was on fire. They’ve cleaned up Lake Erie quite a bit, but it was highly problematic when I was a kid.” Then Opie mocked a little girl’s voice talking to her mommy. “Mom, why are all the fish dead?” She then lowered her voice, “Because they died of old age.” Perhaps Opie bought her mother’s euphemistic explanation as a kid, but she’s not buying it now.

    “In and Around Home” at OCMA ends Sept. 3, 2006. “American Cities” at Gladstone Gallery in New York runs from Sept. 9 — Oct. 4, 2006