Byline: Anne Martens

Ushering in the new era of Trump, a sea of pink at the 2017 Women’s March became the first undeniable sign of mass resistance. A resounding response to “grab ’em by the pussy” and other far-flung insults that characterized the presidential election. For a while, the handmade, cat-eared hats were everywhere. One might even a draw a correlation between the Women’s March and its inclusion of Pussy Hats to the strength-in-numbers power of the #MeToo movement.

Jayna Zweiman is the co-creator of Pussy Hat. She has since launched another project, “Welcome Blanket,” to honor refugee immigrants. As we talked about both projects this summer, there was a backlash to the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of separating asylum-seeking families and the Supreme Court’s upholding of the travel ban. Like an oracle, Zweiman seems able to predict each new wave of progressive consciousness.

Zweiman is an architect. Fascinated by the idea of turning a line into sculptural form, she learned how to knit while on an architecture fellowship. Later, that would factor into Pussy Hat, which was conceived and mobilized in a knitting circle. She describes each hat as “like a brick” in the massive community infrastructure she helped build to launch a million hats on the National Mall. With Welcome Blanket she applies the concept of a “line of yarn” to the 2000-mile proposed border wall between Mexico and the United States, re-contextualizing it as a line of inclusion. A very real 2000 miles of yarn (or other sewing/crafting material) is used to make blankets for incoming immigrants.

People from across the country are making knit, crocheted and quilted blankets in response to calls for submission posted on social media, the internet and craft stores. The blankets mostly, but not exclusively, come from women. With each, an accompanying note communicates a message to its receiver. The notes tell personal stories of relatives who fled wars, persecution, famine, or endured slavery or forced migration.

Thousands of blankets were collected last year by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, then displayed together as an exhibition. Volunteers logged everything into a database to track the donations’ eventual delivery to refugee resettlement organizations, which will then distribute them. This summer, blankets were featured in a show at the Museum of Design Atlanta, and at a fundraising event in Los Angeles for Miry’s List, a local nonprofit that assists refugees from places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Welcome Blanket’s implementation, from its grass-roots solicitation of maker-donors to its collection- and distribution-networks, and even notes from one stranger to another, follows the model devised for Pussy Hat. This template for a large-scale, crowd-sourced approach draws from Zweiman’s own experiences. As a political activist in the late ’90s, Zweiman helped plan Bill Clinton’s second inauguration, which informed her calculation about the impact of a large crowd on the National Mall. Another experience she drew on was her recent recovery from a debilitating injury. When she learned of the Women’s March, she wasn’t well enough to travel. She decided to do so by proxy, through those who could wear hats that she and others made.

Can the hats and blankets be viewed as legitimate pieces of art? Many of the blankets are superbly crafted. Some are brilliant in concept, like a knit black-and-white one with an image of a QR code that reads “This land is made for you and me.” Individually, most blankets don’t really register as art but simply as handcrafted textiles. Yet, like the panels of the AIDS Quilt (first displayed in its entirety on the National Mall in 1987) they resonate en masse. As holistic projects, Pussy Hat and Welcome Blanket can be viewed as conceptual, performance and/or installation art. One influence on Pussy Hat was Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates (2005). Its swaths of a single-hued fabric sparked the idea for the sea of pink. Another was the AIDS Quilt, which is generally considered to be folk art. Now embraced by the contemporary art world, craft has shed its pejorative association as “women’s work” and even embraces that as a form of empowerment. “Craftivism” is a further extension of such power.

Art, of course, has historically always been a tool for political activism. Pussy Hats and Welcome Blankets are now collected and exhibited by museums. Significantly, as projects they extend the concept of what art is, and who the artist is. Are the many enlisted makers artists? The implication of extending art’s scope is itself a form of Zweiman’s particular brand of activism for its invitation to any and all who wish to participate.

In Sandra de la Loza’s art, research—what she calls “the archive”—is central to her process. Treating archival material as mutable; she relies on it to expand narratives about history. She is also involved in community activism. Not everything she does is art, or at least happens in that context. But if art serves as a metaphorical megaphone, she uses it to broadcast loudly, aiming to erase the invisibility of marginalized communities.

Blending the roles of artist, activist and educator, de la Loza teaches social practice at Otis College. Social practice is also the subject of “Talking into Action, Art, Pedagogy, and Activism in the Americas,” a PST: LA/LA exhibition at Otis’ Ben Maltz Gallery. The show focuses on dialogues between Los Angeles and Latin American artists, and de la Loza collaborated with Buenos Aries artist Eduardo Molinari.

De la Loza was born and raised in LA—as were her parents—a factor that has significantly shaped her outlook. In a 2004 interview in Latin Art, she said: “My parents grew up at a time when Mexicans couldn’t live in certain neighborhoods, when they were physically hit in schools when they spoke Spanish. I was very conscious of how they internalized that and learned that their Mexican-ness was something they should erase, and how that was passed onto my siblings and me.” Her parents also experienced the Zoot Suit era, a time of emerging cultural pride. Looking at family photos, de la Loza noticed signs of an identity conflict in her parents’ poses. For an art project, she turned them into silhouettes.

Beyond family as subject, de la Loza began to focus on community and collective identity, now central to her practice. It comes from a desire to engage with others, and to create in spaces that aren’t as safe or predictable as the art world. These interests are evident in two of her best-known projects, both from 2011: a book, The Pocho Research Society Field Guide to L.A.: Monuments and Murals of Erased and Invisible Histories, and experimental videos presented in “Mural Remix,” a solo exhibition at LACMA and part of the first Pacific Standard Time.

For Operation Invisible Monument (2002), a collaborative piece presented in The Pocho Research Society Field Guide to L.A., she installed unauthorized historical plaques around downtown Los Angeles to commemorate the absence of Mexican-Americans in official accounts of city history. In a satirical portrait, she wears a ski mask, jumpsuit and sneakers, poised for action, drill in hand. Mural Remix included a documentary video that chronicles the history of LA’s street murals. In a 3-channel video installation, Action Portraits, their colors and patterns are projected onto the nude bodies of performers who brush paint on themselves to create a green-screen effect. Visually, the paint is replaced by the murals’ emblematic imprint on skin.

Given the civic-minded nature of de la Loza’s work, her interests have compelled her to expand beyond art world contexts. In the Chicano-Latino communities of East Los Angeles, she advocates for poor working-class people adversely affected by the area’s rapid gentrification. Through photography and video, she documents activities such as tenant-rights workshops and acts of public protest. Her role is not simply to bear witness, but to organize.

Interaction and collaboration is central to the project that de la Loza presents in “Talking into Action.” She and Eduardo Molinari both use research to engage in social movements. They visited one another in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires and participated in community action projects together. They also went on a lot of walks, inviting local activists to join them, and talk.

Of Molinari, de la Loza says: “We operate in different contexts, shaped by different political systems that hold different histories. But we also share a desire to gain a better understanding of the larger infrastructures that shape the societies in which we live; how knowledge can inform how we envision and work toward liberatory processes.”

Their multimedia installation includes visual, archival, sound, and text-based elements, and—as de la Loza describes it—functions as a “ritualized space.” The rituals are brujeria, witchcraft; and specifically, what she calls brujeria archivistica, a practice that reveals “obscured narratives and hidden ghosts” in historical material. The goal is to use ritual to purge the oppressions of history (and those of the present).

De la Loza has also begun a new project of her own, exploring the region around the confluence of the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco, near where she grew up. She considers its history and ecology. She learns from local native people, and scours the landscape for signs of colonial impact on indigenous populations: the Spanish missionaries and later, the railroad tycoons, plying the American West. She notices abandoned railroad tracks, and considers the ruins of the “White City,” an exclusive 1890s resort community atop a peak in the San Gabriel mountains—a byproduct of the railroad boom and a symbol of exclusionism and greed. For de La Loza, the archive yields hidden ghosts like these, which she’ll expose to light.

All images courtesy of the artist.

See De la Loza’s work at Otis Ben Maltz Gallery, Talking to Action: Art, Pedagogy, and Activism in the Americas, 9/17–12/10/2017

With its third installment at the Hammer Museum, “Made in L.A.” has settled into its brand as a well-researched survey of current trends and practices in regional art. But there is never a “settling in” as far as expectations for a biennial, which raises the bar not only for curators and the artists involved, but also for those who experience it. Aiming to review the show, I spent one afternoon in the galleries and returned several times. Half of the projects inspired me; the other half left me confused.

I gravitated to Kenneth Tam’s droll video about a group of men—total strangers—enlisted to participate in a social experiment of male bonding through absurd rituals; David R. Small’s “meta” project in which he took movie-set objects from The Ten Commandments (1923 version) literally unearthed from the film site and displayed them as ancient Egyptian artifacts; Wadada Leo Smith’s invented musical notation arranged within Kandinsky-like paintings on paper; Laida Lerxundi’s visually seductive films set in the Southern California landscape; Dena Yago’s veiled poetry as large letters tucked behind windows of translucent glass; Rafa Esparza’s labor-intensive installation of hand-made earthen bricks; Sterling Ruby’s found industrial tables covered in metal slag; Kenzi Shiokava’s rustic totems made of wood from his garden; and Adam Linder’s avant-garde production that rejects the emotionless perfection of modern dance.

 

I had more difficulty with projects like cinematographer Arthur Jafa’s three-ring binder pages of clipped magazine images, which through juxtapositions present a personalized survey of black visual culture, and Labor Link TV’s videos of union activities revealing the plight of disenfranchised, mostly women and minority, workers. What these two examples have in common is that I wouldn’t have considered them art had I not experienced them in a gallery. Although Ruby’s found tables fit an art historical model of the “readymade,” Jafa’s found images, arranged in vitrines running the length of the gallery, fit a newer paradigm. Once I had read an interview in the exhibition catalog about Jafa’s practice of making the books as an outgrowth of his visual acuity as a filmmaker, I came to appreciate them. Labor Link TV’s amateur-quality footage of protests, strikes and arbitration hearings remained a tough sell. But led by artist and educator Fred Lonidier, who encouraged many of his UC San Diego students to participate, their activities could be comparable to Jafa’s when considered as an art practice.

 

Curious about my initial reaction to other projects that I felt were abstruse, I decided to conduct extensive research to see if knowing more could make a difference. I returned to the museum, checked things out online, and read the entire catalog. Clearly this is not a level of investment that most people put in. But it did generate what I’d call empathy. For example, learning about Lebanese artist Huguette Caland’s influence on the Venice Beach art scene as a kind of Gertrude Stein figure deepened my appreciation for her Paul Klee-like drawings and paintings. I had hoped that research would also turn around my reaction to Mark Verabioff’s cryptic installation of wall graphics. Why draw gang tears around the eyes of male rock stars, movie stars and politicians, whose portraits are arranged in rows? Without any explanation to help decode, I left it at that.

 

In contemporary art today, more often than not viewers are expected to educate themselves about artists and their work. There’s reward in that process, but it can also feel alienating. One issue I had with this show is that many works, at least on first encounter, felt needlessly inaccessible. This is often a challenge with performance and time-based works, a problem certainly not unique to this show. For example, seeing Margaret Honda’s 70mm and 35mm film reels and cases displayed on a pedestal made me wonder: “Is this it?” until I noticed the last sentence in the label about related film screenings. I was unable to attend, and could only rely on the catalog essay for any sense of her work.

My interest in Todd Gray’s restaging of a year-long performance in which he wore the clothes of his late friend Ray Manzarek of The Doors compelled me to search the Made in L.A. galleries, only to find a wall label. I was already aware of his performance through a concurrent exhibition at his LA gallery. I was disappointed to learn that the only way to experience his Hammer piece was to encounter the artist if he happened to be at the museum when I was. Letters that Gray wrote to Manzarek’s wife, which are part of the performance, are the best part of the piece. Reproduced in the Made in L.A. catalog and also read by Gray at an event I attended, they are well written, poignant and revelatory. I nevertheless couldn’t help but think of all this as a missed opportunity. One alternative approach to providing texts for ephemeral or time-based work may be to offer short videos of interviews and behind-the-scenes time with artists. There are several excellent ones on the exhibition website. Projects like Gray’s or Honda’s or Verabioff’s could have benefited from this type of engaging presentation.

Made in L.A. offers a unique opportunity for an onsite audience to voice a collective opinion by voting for their favorite artist or project. Whenever I was at the Hammer the voting kiosks appeared empty. If people do vote, I wondered, are only the most visually accessible works selected? Buying an expensive exhibition catalog shouldn’t be compulsory. Relating to contemporary art shouldn’t be this difficult.

But ultimately curators Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker created a thought-provoking exhibition. Although they eschewed overtly embracing themes, threads do exist that bind the diverse projects together and create a sense of context and continuity. Themes such as: artist as curator or archivist; artist as community activist; artists who critique or celebrate communities; online provocateurs; those who revel in language. The curators sought out artists from wide-ranging creative disciplines. Their focus on cross-disciplinary and community-driven art practices made this biennial consistent and smart. So my vote is cast for best Made in L.A.—with the qualifier that you get back only what you invest in.

Considering the degree to which historians live in the past, Amelia Jones may not be what you’d expect. Confronting cultural biases relating to the politics of identity, she seems as much social activist as art historian.

Via art history, Jones speaks out against the art world’s entrenched sexism and racism, challenging the field’s most authoritative voices for insistently promoting a straight white-male perspective. She has made a bold commitment to write about historical and contemporary artists of color, female, gay and queer artists, describing the contexts from which their work has emerged and how and why their art is significant. She addresses the inaccuracies and omissions that have often erased their contributions to both past and present discourse. All of this couldn’t be more relevant to our time.

 

For years Jones has rooted herself in Southern California and its university art programs. She came to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s to earn her PhD at UCLA, taught at UC Riverside during the 1990s, and then went abroad to teach at universities in Manchester, England and Montreal, Canada. She is now Vice Dean of Critical Studies at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, which involves overseeing undergraduate and graduate art history and theory coursework and helping to shape the curriculum.
I interviewed Jones early this year, before an eruption of public controversy over the school’s recent policy and curriculum changes. We spoke mainly about her academic writing, but in the process I came to realize how important teaching is to her and at the heart of writing and teaching, her love of art history.

As an undergraduate student at Harvard, there were a few fits and starts with her direction: literature, psychology, history. Like history courses at that time, art history could be dull: lots of rote memorization. “But it was fun to memorize because you were looking at things,” Jones says of her initial experience studying art history. She went on to earn an M.A. in art history at the University of Pennsylvania, then transferred to UCLA. By the time she arrived in Los Angeles, scholarship had advanced light years beyond rote thinking. Relatively new European theoretical frameworks were introduced into American academics, just as UCLA was developing an art history critical theory program. “It was 1987 and they had just hired Donald Preziosi; he was the first person in the field of art history to my knowledge who was teaching post-structuralism,” Jones says. “And I was minoring in film; a really cool combination. It was like this brief moment where academia felt important. People were debating philosophical issues.”

The topic of Jones’ dissertation certainly stirred debate. The essential point addressed American art criticism and Duchamp’s influence on the development of postmodernism, which she argues was being overemphasized to the exclusion of influential women in New York Dada, such as the outrageous Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. “I was looking at the construction of postmodernism on the back of Marcel Duchamp, so it was a critical analysis of [scholarly contemporary art publications] October and Artforum. They were saying: ‘postmodernism is about “the death of the author” and Duchamp is the artist who founded postmodernism.” And I was like, ‘But you just said it was about the death of the author, so why are you now finding another male artist to be the origin of postmodernism?’ I was tired of seeing all the histories of New York Dada pivot around Duchamp and Man Ray and Picabia and erase all this energy of people like the Baroness and feminist lesbian avant-gardes who were laying this groundwork.” She turned the dissertation into a book, Postmodernism and the Engendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994), which also led to another book, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (2004).

 

As that scholarship was being published, Jones taught and also worked on another research project that resulted in her excellent book, Body Art: Performing the Subject (1998). In Body Art she contextualizes the work of performance artists such as Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci and Hannah Wilke within the framework of post-structuralism and applies feminist theory to examine dynamics at play between their quite diverse practices. Jones draws a relationship between “body art” and contemporary performance art. She says: “The book was initially sparked when I started teaching at Riverside and I would run across this really interesting stuff: In Artforum from the ’60s you would see these advertisements with artists obviously being ironic or funny: the famous Judy Chicago one in which she’s dressed like a boxer, and the Ed Ruscha one, “Say Goodbye to College Joys,” where he’s lying in bed with two women. And I remember thinking: ‘something’s going on here, and no one is taking about it.’” Jones attended live performances by SoCal artists, researched material from Electronic Arts Intermix and the Long Beach Video Archive, and had early access to Judy Chicago’s papers on her performances and activities.

 

Fast forward to now, and Jones has written, co-authored, and edited numerous books and articles on a range of topics. Most focus on performance art and theory—her area of expertise—although she also writes about artists who explore modes of self-identity through other disciplines. “Hysterical Bodies,” “Presence in Absentia,” “Duchamp’s Phallus,” “The Obscenity of Whiteness”—these are some of the engaging partial titles of her provocative journal articles. Beyond snappy titles though, academic writing can be daunting and slow going, and Jones’ prose is thicker than most. She weaves together perspectives from multiple disciplines: feminist and queer studies, film theory, Marxist theory, linguistics. This intertwining greatly complicates things, but it perhaps necessarily conveys the real complexity of issues at stake.

 

Jones’s most recent single-authored book, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), addresses identity politics. Seeing Differently confronts racism within the present-day art world. In it she explains that since the early 1990s, political and popular press rhetoric has proclaimed the “death” of identity and that we are “beyond” such discussions. Jones (in this book and also many other writings) insists that we are not “post identity.” She profiles the work of some exemplary artists since the early ’90s who address the insidious nature of racism: Martha Wilson, Renée Cox, William Pope.L, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Glenn Ligon, Susan Silton, Catherine Opie, to mention just a few. Seeing Differently implicitly raises the question: “What are we going to do about this?” And during our conversation, Jones makes clear that “racism” can be thought of as a broad term that speaks to many types of exclusionism, deeply rooted in legacies of conflict and pain. She says: “On some basic, inherent level, it’s actually not about skin color. It’s about the way that we hierarchize groups of people. And in [certain] cultures it gets attached to race or to ethnicity or to class.”

Reading her texts, one might wonder about Jones’ own identity. In some of her writing, to achieve a point she makes this clear: she is white and heterosexual. She also describes her upbringing, in which she attended all-black schools in North Carolina, and more recent experiences living in other countries, where her language or accent made her and family members stand out—examples that illustrate the point that lived experience also informs perspective. Jones describes how her childhood informed her writing. “Seeing Differently begins with me saying: ‘I grew up as a white kid in the American South, going to all-black schools.’ I included the front of my high school yearbook from North Carolina, [showing many black students in front of the building] with two white people standing there, to make the point. People need to know, if they’re interested in how I’m framing that set of problems.”

 

The act of framing does make a difference. Early in her career, Jones was considered a feminist scholar. “Race and class were much more central to my life as a child than gender was. Why I didn’t address race more centrally in my work is something that I interrogated,” she says, “because that’s a sign of my privilege as a white person. But feminist art history was a nascent, available discourse that I could attach myself to and make sense of at the time. Now everything I do is conditioned by [race] because I don’t allow it to seem invisible. At least half of the artists that I write about are not white by default; it’s just a point I make.”

Jones’ teaching and research are conditioned by her dedication to the issues she cares about; and underscoring that, her commitment to the contemporary relevance of art history. Up until her relatively new position at USC, she taught in art history programs. Colleagues viewed her more as a theorist than a historian. At Roski the emphasis is different, she says, with most students aiming to become practicing artists. Perhaps because of that, there’s a sense of urgency in Jones’ voice. “I feel that history [is important], especially being in an art school. They deserve to know, these students. Like even the idea of art. Where did that come from? Because the more they can know about what artists and intellectuals have done and thought about in the past, whether it’s directly related to visual art or not, the more empowered they are to make choices.”

Think about the differences between the long-standing practices of painting and sculpture, and clichés persist: Painting is “flat,” sculpture is not; paintings go on a wall, sculptures do not. In contemporary art these separate paths often intersect; some notable mid-20th century examples being Jasper Johns’ encaustic and plaster paintings, Lucio Fontana’s stabbed canvases, Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines and Lee Bontecou’s wire-and-fabric wall sculptures. Try to determine the edges where one medium leaves off and the other begins, and you end up in a circuitous thought process.

Right now contemporary painting is having a sculptural moment. Florian Schmidt, who builds holes into paintings using cardboard and canvas, and Katharina Grosse, who sprays paint on a grand scale, are challenging assumptions about painting’s supposed non-relationship with real space. Some of the most intriguing experiments in painting are happening in Los Angeles. Dianna Molzan reconsiders a painting’s structural components by revealing the wooden framework, fitting stretcher bars with canvas sleeves and horizontally slashing stretched canvas until it sags. Matthew Chambers takes apart “failed” paintings and cuts the encrusted canvas into strips to wrap around stretcher bars. These new works are characterized by radial patterns and highly uneven surfaces. He takes a similar approach with clean canvas, coating the stretched strips in a solid color with automotive paint, or other glossy materials that can cause the strips to curl for a multidimensional effect.

I recently asked Chambers and seven other mostly LA-based painters who work sculpturally about what they do. Painters seem especially loyal to the rules of the medium, even as they venture into territory occupied by other media. They speak a language that demonstrates their intimacy with formal principles governing composition, color and even dimensionality. They must consider the real or metaphorical “wall,” that key presentational element that communicates “painting” to the viewer.

So what happens when any element or rule is upended? Does that change what makes a painting? “Painting probably does require paint, or at least some paint-like substance,” says Steven Wolkoff. (I agree, but secretly make an exception for Bontecou’s paint-less sculptures.) Wolkoff writes with paint squeezed from a pastry bag to form thick, matted layers across a canvas, or individual words to be gathered into sculptural piles that are loosely inspired by Anish Kapoor’s mountains of dry pigment. Wolkoff’s words and phrases have a conceptual purpose by referencing cultural touchstones in art, film, social media. Acrylic paint is often used in his work.

Stretcher bars, canvas, that rectangular shape on a wall; what happens when you take those away? Does that change what painting is? The answer I hear back is that none of that is critical. Like Wolkoff, Margie Livingston makes sculptural objects from acrylic paint, which she thickens with a gel medium. She pours and pools it into swirls of color. Once it dries, she takes the highly elastic skins and folds or drapes them. Other works are carved from dry chunks of paint into remarkable shapes. Livingston says of her process: “I’m playing with the weight of paint, letting gravity reveal the material’s flexibility.”

Linda Stark also talks about paint’s properties, but employs the slow-drying medium of oil. “Oil paint has a way of catching and reflecting light, especially on a three-dimensional surface,” she says. Her evocative jewel-colored paintings can take years to complete as she applies layers of translucent glaze, sometimes choosing to embed plants and dead insects. Stripes of built-up paint can radiate from a central knot or form a weave, with drips of paint extending the painting’s design beyond its edges. She says of her initial inspiration: “I was influenced by the industrial storm drains with their mineral buildup, near my downtown LA loft. I was drawn to explore the natural gravity and fluidity of oil paint, its tendency to drip, the way it builds up over an extended period of time.”

Time, especially “geological time,” is an apt metaphor for Laura Moriarty’s process and the conceptual premise behind her painting/sculptures. She works in encaustic (pigmented beeswax) to make striped and marbled objects that in a striking way resemble land formations. She casts shapes by slowly building up striations of color, then reworks them by fusing, carving, incising and chiseling; “excavation techniques” that suggest the physicality of land-shaping forces. For her, this fourth dimension of time has more meaning than any sculptural concerns.

“Painting can be determined by intention,” says Leanne Lee. “My intention is always to create a painting and to think as a painter, even if the outcome may resemble a sculpture.” Lee’s free-form shaped paintings can seem like they float on a wall, even though they are built of heavy plywood and are often huge in size. Across their surfaces, colors swirl and, in select areas, plant-like patterns pop up in relief. Up close you notice that this cake-frosting-like ornamentation is entirely made of paint. She applies a similar technique to freestanding sculptural pieces made of found wood.

Intention also explains the dimensional, shelf-like structures that Christopher Mercier builds to support thick applications of dried and wet paint. Some are relatively simple, like the three-sided “helmet” in which you might place your head for viewing. He also builds wall-length pieces with tilted panels. Strategically placed mirrors extend the metaphor of spatial illusionism. Mercier says: “A painting needs to address the issue of image making, which for me isn’t really about paint first and foremost—it is this ground or stage that viewers recognize as a space in which they can find painting.” Which explains why his newest piece is so large that you can literally walk inside it.

To most of these artists though, the fiction of the window doesn’t matter. Maya Lujan’s paintings do entertain the concept of spatial illusion but then playfully reject it. This is most apparent in works that feature thick skins of dried paint attached to the top of a canvas. These flaps of paint extend down, often past the canvas and even to the floor. And they can also obscure that prime image area, the front of the painting. In one series, the paint strips deliberately evoke stage curtains; in other works, those long car-wash sponges. “When I paint, I let the paint stand on its own and reference itself through sculpture,” Lujan says.

I ask these artists if and how they incorporate the tradition of sculpture. “I like to use materials that are typically associated with both practices,” says Lee. For her this means incorporating chicken wire, mesh, foam, rope and wood. In general though, how these artists work with paint—paradoxically—is what led them toward sculpture. Mercier, an architect by trade, might use a construction trowel rather than a palette knife or brush. Then there are sculptural processes like casting. Livingston uses techniques to manipulate dry paint that resemble what sculptors might do to clay or stone or metal. “I fold, cut, drill, saw, sand, tack, twist, roll, glue, stack or otherwise shape it,” she says. And then there’s the presentational aspect: the reality of sculpture as a stand-alone object. “Paintings can embody the same presence as sculpture, where one can consider the physical interaction of the viewer,” Lee says.

For most of these artists, it isn’t a question that painting can simultaneously be a sculpture and vice versa. Works of art can borrow from various disciplines. “Sometimes you find pieces that really do live in that middle ground,” says Mercier. By fearlessly experimenting, by throwing aside rules, by thinking sculpturally, these artists reframe our expectations about what a painting is.

Ry Rocklen saved oyster shells, along with some rocks, then tried to unload them one day at a garage sale. “I didn’t sell a thing,“ he told me in an interview, about his boyhood collecting obsession. Decades later, he is still drawn to treasuring odd stuff: discarded junk, mail order trophy parts, even his own used clothing. Valuing their material qualities and cultural currency, he assembles them into sculptures. Often they have embellished surfaces, with a recurring motif being a tiled or checkerboard pattern.

Rocklen began his career in the late 2000s with grungy domestic items turned into works of stunning beauty: saggy mattresses covered with iridescent bathroom tiles, a mattress as a “reverse bed of nails” (Refuge, 2007)—which he loosely refers to as “sequins” for their dazzling visual effect—copper- and nickel-plated folded bed sheets (Cover to Cover, 2010), a tattered patio umbrella emerging from the seat of a wooden chair (Umbrella, 2009). His first solo show out of grad school at Black Dragon Society took place at a fortuitous moment, as LA’s Chinatown reached a zenith in popularity as a destination gallery row and the city was emerging as an art world center.

I asked Rocklen—who was born and raised here and is a graduate of UCLA and USC—about the influence of place. He described a common local experience key to his art. “When it comes to stuff laying by the side of the road, LA’s such a perfect place for it, since there’s room for things to sit around for a while in unclaimed territory.” He speculated that conditions aren’t as conducive in other cities. Perhaps because most finds are household objects, he turns that into a guiding principle. “I have the general criteria that whatever it is should be fairly ubiquitous, like a bed or a chair or a table.” His website is telling, with works categorized according to quotidian experiences: sit, sleep, shelter, wardrobe, décor.

Another constant is his wry (he might say “Ry”) wit, clearly apparent in his works’ titles, which are usually puns. Subtle humor creeps into the actual sculptures too—not as irony, but as a genuine celebration of the absurdity in his found objects’ transformations. This lighthearted sensibility is nevertheless grounded in some serious art history. The switch from useful to useless, non-art to art, is by now a sacred tradition, rooted in the iconic touchstones of Dada and Surrealist readymades and Rauschenburg combines.

Like other contemporary LA artists, Rocklen draws from the city’s rich history of assemblage art, but also more broadly, of sculpture as a discipline. He considers Charles Ray, his undergraduate professor at UCLA, a great influence. “Through working with Charlie I was shown the potential of sculpture at a really fundamental level. I remember him talking about how seeing a work, you could have a sensation. How the choice of materials affects perception; an understanding of weight.” As Rocklen said this, I recalled the strangely visceral experience I had when viewing a particular work—the copper- and nickel-plated folded bed sheets—on his website. Without ever having seen the real thing, I “felt” the comfortable texture and weight of fabric switched out by something much heavier and colder.

Rocklen continued. “Some of the potency is an innate or instinctual familiarity.” Of found objects, he said, “These things are used habitually, like a curtain being drawn everyday, or a chair being sat on. There’s a sense of labor by its former user.” For his installation at the Hammer Museum’s first “Made in LA” exhibition, he created floor tiles from thrift store paintings. By doing so, he co-opted somebody else’s relationship to them. He thinks about this, too, when occasionally enlisting help. While making Refuge, he invited friends to drop nails into a mesh screen. “That’s part of the appeal, the intensity of production; the energy in service of this aesthetic marvel.” He attributes this acquired-labor approach to Mike Kelley’s For All the Love Hours Lost, the late artist’s stuffed-animal hybrids with their patina of wear.

A recent Rocklen piece, Second to None (2011) functions similarly, consisting of found objects—trophies—bereft of their original owners. Thinking of them as once prized and now lonely anthropomorphic stand-ins for human endeavor and passion, they share with Kelley’s tossed-aside toys an intentionally pathetic vibe. Visually, though, Rocklen’s stacked paeans to achievement remind me of Chris Burden’s Urban Light, LACMA’s outdoor assembly of vintage street lamps, for their formal, comparative arrangements.

Within the last few years, Rocklen has made fewer found-object sculptures and seems to be taking a radically different turn. Instead of collecting worn out consumer goods and heightening their uniqueness, he is doing the opposite: referencing the used or customized as a point of departure and mass-producing that. He is currently casting his entire wardrobe in porcelain. “I’m treating myself as a found object,” he said. The day I visited the studio, a number of molds and casts were in various states of production. It was fascinating to make out the textures of folded clothing in the hard, bone-white material and realize—just as with detritus dragged off the street—that I could discern subtleties of use. One shirt was threadbare, another brand new.
Last year he began developing a line of furniture, “Trophy Modern,” made from trophy parts. The found trophies of Second to None had led to a full-on obsession, as he thought about how they were originally put together. Shiny new parts are now mail-ordered and used as components in tables and chairs. They have also found their way into fabricated chess sets. “Like a version of Legos, it’s about creating a system and adhering to it.”

What appeals to Rocklen about this new turn in his work is that the primary purpose is not art. “It is to be sat on or used as a coffee table or as a liner for a shower, which doesn’t make it any less important.” This made sense to me until he said: “It doesn’t matter if it’s art or not.” Was he implying that he was simply going to do what he wanted to anyway? I can’t help but think that when an artist creates something, it is automatically art, the functional aspect being moot or at least secondary.

This summer Rocklen performed a rap session at LACMA’s bookstore in conjunction with the unveiling of an edition of 10 chess sets. Trophy parts make up the pieces, with basketball players for the kings and queens, crosses for bishops, jockeys for knights, school graduates for rooks and basketballs for pawns. Thinking of the checkerboard surfaces reminds me of Marcel Duchamp’s obsession with the game. For a while he even gave up art for it. We can only imagine the quintessential Dada artist—champion of the readymade—thrilled at the sight of a Ry Rocklen Trophy Modern Chess Set.

Find it in Everything is a slight hardcover book, newly published by Little Brown and Company, featuring Facebook-style photographs by Drew Barrymore. You can find it on Amazon or even at the MOCA bookstore in LA. According to the back cover, Barrymore is now “a photographer.” A biography mentions that her work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New York (a claim that’s difficult to verify on ICP’s website).

“Hearts are my beacons,” Barrymore explains in the introduction. And heart-shaped symbols are what you’ll find in these black-and-white and color snapshots taken over the last decade. Barrymore discovers them in architecture and furniture, in stained or ripped clothing, in patterns of strewn trash or strange light reflections, even in the eyes of her dog.

 

 

Many pictures feature food: a string of sausage links, a bite in an apple, packaged raw tuna filets, a burst bubble in a pancake, a piece of scallion at the bottom of a bowl of miso soup. Her pictures remind me of Martin Parr’s photography for their informal yet obsessive take on banal subjects. But that may be too generous a comparison.

The photographs in this book are amateur, and really there’s not much point in wasting words on them. They are predictable; just do a Google Image search on “heart-shaped” and you’ll see. But still, I can’t help but think about the motivation behind this project, beyond a celebrity schedule that includes self-branding activities like playing an artist in actual life.

But as a viewer of her book, even for a fan of Barrymore-as- actress, the most interesting and telling picture is the one in which we see her physical presence. In this headless selfie, she is lying down, holding a script for The Three Musketeers, her dog beside her. Her sock-covered feet point toward a guitar with a heart-shaped opening. This is the closest Barrymore gets to an honest photograph that doesn’t feel like part of a larger marketing campaign.

I have to admit: I like Drew. I’ve always suspected that there’s a wry sense of humor hidden behind that sweet/saccharine facade. My favorite Barrymore role is the voice of Jillian, Brian’s girlfriend in Family Guy (Brian being the cartoon’s highly anthropomorphized family dog). So when I chose this book to review, it was in part because I am a fan of Drew’s occasional irreverent side.

Despite the fact that celebrities get all the best breaks (stolen from those of us who work all our lives in a field they just dabble in so we can achieve less), nevertheless I’ve found myself caught up in the book’s spirit. There’s a sense of play, of wonder, of achievement in observing the world so closely. That is what artists are good at. The title of the book is a call to action: “Find it in everything.” So as an experiment in trying to see the world like Drew, I am now making photos of hearts. Next, I might try acting.

All images by Drew Barrymore

The following slideshow is by Anne Martens, who was inspired by Drew Barrymore’s book:

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It was waiting for me to find it.I blame the title of Drew Barrymore’s new photography book, Find It In Everything—which I just reviewed for Artillery—for my recent impulse to chase vehicles on the freeway that have heart shapes in their advertising or on license plates. In fact I’ve been doing double takes everywhere, stopping to take pictures with my iPhone. I used to hate this insipid, cruel, in-your-face symbol and probably still do. But now, thanks to Drew, I can’t help but ♥ everything.  —AM

During a studio visit, Jim Skuldt points out that milk crates around the world don’t come in a single standard size and shape, as one might have thought. He points to a few of his that are filled and stacked beneath a large desk and loaded onto roadie carts that came from the purchase of Neil Diamond’s well-worn touring stage, which he has repurposed in the service of art. Such mundane things hold high status in Skuldt’s work. Why? As he eloquently explains, objects like milk crates are components of modular systems, which in turn function as key players in networks that increasingly grow more complex and integral to a globalized, 21st-century culture.

If you can imagine combining the diverse sensibilities of artists like Andrea Zittel, Martin Kersels, Mike Kelley and Bas Jan Ader, you might have a hint of Skuldt’s art. But nothing prepares like checking out his website (www.skuldt.com), where physical and mediated reality are intertwined. Creating and appropriating modular elements, spatial diagraming, mapping and graphing are all activities central to Skuldt’s art-making. He combines an engineer’s or city planner’s approach with the imagination of an adolescent to solve problem conditions in his own personal space or, alternatively, on the scale of the world. But whether the artist builds sculptures or performs for an audience in a gallery or through an online video, there’s an element of myth-making that makes the viewer unsure of what has in fact happened or is perhaps imagined.

In fact, Skuldt’s website may be a better indication of the artist’s psychology than seeing his studio or even his most recent exhibition. Past and current projects come across as a reflection of a seemingly schizophrenic and deeply subversive sensibility, with incredibly funny deadpan descriptions of project goals, obsessive plans and diagrams, internet-appropriated photographs for analogy, and reportorial-style videos with deliberately garbled voice-overs. The modular mapping of space is a constant thread in activities as diverse as documenting his neighbors’ littering habits via daily blog posts to a high-concept plan to outsmart and trap stray alley cats in need of neutering.

In a recent exhibition at the Armory Center in Pasadena, “Island Effects,” how land evolves over time is the ultimate subject of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and a video, with the tragi-comical implication that California will (again) be subsumed by ocean. Skuldt’s current and most ambitious project is his dream of traveling around the world literally as container cargo, within a customized apartment of his own design. The compartment would require refrigeration/heating, plumbing, and electricity, not to mention the logistics of arranging travel and—here’s the expensive part—the cranes to hoist his DIY hotel onto ships, planes, and other modes of transport.

Skuldt has been planning this shipping container project since 2007, and you can see representations of the idea in much of his art to date. Lately he has secured institutional support in order to make it happen within the next three years. As he documents his great journey, it will no doubt be impossible to separate out the factual accounts from myth. But then, who would want to?